Sector(s)
Team Members
Project Team
GoalGorilla project managers: Evelien Schut and Taco Potze
UNDP project managers: Noella Richard and Romolo Tassone
Visit the site
Visit the siteOrganizations Involved
Community contributions
Drupal 8 Core
A core bug was fixed that caused a Fatal error in Book navigation block for unpublished parent book items.
Open Social distribution
Some improvements created for this platform were pushed to Open Social, making the distribution even richer and more powerful to use. Some key improvements are:
- Book page implementation
- Image cropping for all content types containing images (drupal media initiative)
- Dynamic page titles for overview pages based on filter values
- Hide my email address from other users (privacy setting)
- Reversed sorting for past events filter
- Profile tagging and searching
- Count the downloads of files attached to nodes
- Social Sharing buttons
The UN Security Council recognizes the positive role young women and men play in maintaining international security. The task force for Youth, Peace and Security proposed to host, coordinate, and facilitate an updated and expanded Youth4Peace platform in order to provide interested parties and partners access to relevant and timely information. The platform was originally developed by the UNDP to serve the 2015 Global Forum Youth, Peace, and Security.
About the project
The Youth4Peace portal was developed using an Agile method. We use this approach to continuously
assess users’ needs and areas of interest, which then determine future development goals for the portal.
The timeline for the first phase was only 2 months, so using Open Social as a foundation was crucial to the success of the project. The first project phase focused on key aspects such as:
- A curated Knowledge Resource Library
- Moderated e-Discussions & e-Consultations
- Experts’ Profiles
- News & Events and their overviews with filters
Community managers are able to decide which content is visible to the outside world and which content is only visible to logged-in members. By being able to create content for non-community members (i.e. anonymous), the reach of the global platform can be even bigger. Public content can be optimized for search engines (SEO) and can be easily shared through public social networks.
The first goal of the Youth4Peace project is to create a community, share knowledge, and start learning from the needs of the people on the platform.
The goals for phase 2 will include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Multi-language user-interface and content
- e-Trainings & Webinars
- e-Advocacy for young people
Why Drupal was chosen
Since many UNDP sites with a social component have been built with Drupal, the UNDP was already familiar with this system. The organization favors open-source, mostly because of the reusability of modules and code from other Drupal projects.
Moreover, the Drupal 8 community distribution Open Social matches many the goals of the project; it's innovative, uses the latest technology, and will be supported and maintained for many years to come. The distribution already contained most of the required features for the project, including blogs, events, profiles, information streams, a discussion engine, and moderation tools for community managers.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
The Open Social distribution consists of a package of pre-configured modules that form one of the most powerful Drupal 8 distributions to date. It comes with configured implementations for key social modules such as:
Address
A great implementation with over 200 address formats and validations right out of the box.
Group
A great new module to create arbitrary collections of content and users. It has a separation of concerns, using a full-fledged group entity that contains all the richness from the Entity API in core!
Message
Integrated as part of our Activity Stream, because it works well with tokens and translations.
Search API
A framework for easily creating searches on any entity known to Drupal, using any kind of search engine (as Apache Solr). In our case, it allows us to build flexible searches on content (Topics and Events) and users.
Profile
Conceptually different than user account settings. With multiple profile support and private profile types, the Profile module gives great flexibility for configuring user profiles.
Bootstrap
To make the Youth4Peace's user-interface intuitively understandable for a wide range of users, we use Google’s Material Design principles and as a base theme we use Twitter’s Bootstrap. Bootstrap is included by default in the Open Social distribution.
