COM SSA

A web platform for climate action in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Type
Website, Portal
Sectors
Environmental, Sustainability, Energy, Climate
Technologies
Javascript, PHP, CodeIgniter, MySQL

A catalyst for local climate action in Sub-Saharan Africa

CoM SSA supports local governments in moving from planning to implementation, with a focus on unlocking climate finance at the local level.

It is a partnership between city networks, development agencies and funding institutions, supporting cities in meeting the dual challenge of climate change and access to sustainable energy to achieve a low-emission, climate-resilient and sustainable energy future.

Through many years of experience developing custom web platforms, this was yet another thrilling challenge that made us tick. We've worked on projects of this nature before, which include different user types (each with their own permissions and features), heaps of custom functionality and features coupled with multi-language support, Elemental was entrusted with this exciting project.

A BESPOKE WEB PLATFORM FOR LOCAL AND REGIONAL GOVERNMENTS

CoM SSA was looking for a solution to manage their content and looking for a platform that allows them to easily and systematically engage with signatories. Eliminating the need for back and forth (documents), the platform does that.

CoM SSA initially wanted to use WordPress, but because there was quite a bit of information that needed to be displayed on the front-end (public-facing) website that comes from the backend framework, we found it wouldn’t be the ideal solution for them. After careful consideration and research, we proposed a PHP MVC framework that would better suit their data requirements.

In the future, if they want to add more features and functionalities; going the PHP MVC framework route will allow them to scale and add these custom requirements to their platform easily. However, if we had to go the WordPress coupled with a framework route, there would always be limitations. At some point, some things would not be possible to implement, purely due to the architecture and capabilities being limited and prohibitive.

A CUSTOM CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

There were many complexities and highly functional features that needed to be scoped out to a very detailed level. The more complex the better, this project was right up our alley!

One of the project requirements was the ability to allow the administrator to enter text into the CMS in English and then have the system automatically translate this into French and Portuguese. We achieved this by implementing the Google Translate API to allow for the translation of the text.

Additionally, we were able to isolate different resources per language with the correct languages. For example, if a page was changed to French, you would see a video in french, view french pdfs, etc. The resources library is where the administrators were able to upload PDF files and categories them so that the users can easily search various topics related to energy, climate finance, research, etc.

The news section was built in a way that made it easy to add news articles as well as include different content types such as documents, images, podcasts, and even embed youtube videos.

Upcoming and past events were also listed on this page, whereby the administrators are able to add specific events for other users to participate in. They are able to set the date and time of the event as well as the google maps location. Through a nifty calendar integration, the users are able to add events to their personal calendars (Google Calendar, Outlook, Safari, iCal) and even browse events using the search and drop-down feature.

A SIGNATORIES PORTAL LIKE NO OTHER

Through the signatories portal city officials are able to register and log in to their secure profile on the website. The Majors as well as members of their team are able to register onto the platform and if they meet the requirement they have access to the signatory portal.

There were many well-thought-out features within this portal that we’ll cover below.

Keeping the community informed and educated was made simple through some really effective features within the portal. Signatory users are able to read, share and upload peer-reviewed journey articles as well as case studies and relevant documents with each other. Then through the engagement forum CoM SSA allowed signatories to engage on topics around development, project finance, building partnerships around energy and climate change topics.

Members are kept up to date through a consolidated view of CoM SSA projects within Sub-Saharan Africa. This consisted of a project pipeline that showcases how far along in the journey various CoM SSA projects are, as well as, the impacts of these projects. Other users can see what projects CoM SSA is connected to, what the progress is, and what the new projects are going to be.

Additionally, funding opportunities are a pretty nifty feature that involves a set of questions and the answers that the user chooses which will determine whether there are opportunities for them to get funding or not.

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INTERESTING FACTS

A lot of thought went into the look and feel of the website. We implement animations using Greensocks which is a Javascript Animation Library. This added a personal touch by including fun and animated moving images.

Another nifty addition was the Twitter Feed Integration which was developed to integrate with Twitter's API, which essentially provides us with the ability to receive and submit data from Twitter through a central interface. Using this API meant that we pull the feed directly from Twitter onto the website.

WE LOVE A GOOD CHALLENGE

Responsiveness quickly became a challenge due to the various language options available. We noticed the Portuguese language text was much longer than English (30% longer to be exact) which affected the styling on mobile and other devices.

Accommodating each language on each page was a curve ball we didn't anticipate starting off this exciting project but through careful planning and the experience of our senior developers we were able to overcome this.