World Fair Trade Day is an international celebration held every year on and around the second Saturday of May. It is organized by members of the International Fair Trade Assocation (IFAT) across seventy countries. Previous events have included Fair Trade breakfasts, talks, markets, live performances, fashion shows, carnivals and processions to promote Fair Trade business and campaign for justice in international commerce. IFAT was formally established in 1989 and is unique in representing Fair Trade groups across the whole globe. All its members are 100% committed to Fair Trade.

Host Universal, an ethical communications agency which has been responsible for some of the highest profile ethical campaigns in the UK for Cafe Direct and Ecotricity asked Green Quadrant to develop the website for World Fair Trade Day 2009 on behalf of IFAT.

Given all the things that needed doing and the very short timescale for getting the first version of the site up and running (about a month), Joomla was the obvious choice for a content management system and development platform – not to mention the obvious ethical fit between free and open source software and free trade.

Phase one of the project needed the site to have multiple language capabilities, video, forums, blogs, extended user registration and management, links to social networking sites and RSS feeds from social networks such as meetup.com.

Although we had used several of the Joomla extensions many times before, we ended up spending quite a lot of time test-installing and comparing different components. The huge variety of Joomla extensions is of course a fantastic resource but sifting for the really goods ones can take some time. The main ones we used in the end were: Joomfish, Seyret, Ultimate Social Bookmarking, Community Builder, Fireboard, MyBlog and jomComment.

Use of these extensions saved an enormous amount of time in terms of getting functionalities up and running. The main challenge we faced was in getting all the different extensions to work well with each other. This problem is particularly pronounced with the latest version of Joomla as a lot of the extensions have only very recently been ported to Joomla 1.5. Getting Joomfish and Fireboard to work well together proved particularly difficult although we received fantastic support (and patches!) from the Joomfish team. It's ironic really that Joomfish is so good as a multi-lingual extension, that in many ways it would be better if it were part of the Joomla core, as this would force other developers to make sure that their extensions are compatible with it. (MyBlog and JomComment for example still don't support Joomfish). Our only other quibble with some of the extensions was that the default CSS could sometimes do with a bit more attention.

Despite many hours searching and the fact that there are lots of very good calendar-based Joomla extensions for event management we couldn't find one that did quite what we wanted (registering hundreds of events all across the globe all on a single day) so we ended up writing our own module for this. The new Joomla MVC architecture provides a fantastic base on which to develop robust, well-structured code.

The site is still very much in development and we hope in the next phase of the project to extend its social networking capabilities with Community Builder, GroupJive and uddeIM amongst other new extensions. We are quite disappointed that Ravenswood IT has chosen not to develop UHP2 (user home pages) for Joomla 1.5 as this would have provided a fantastic base on which to build user-controlled mini sites within the site – something which we still want to do and no other extension really seems to handle fully.

IFAT was pleased with the choice of Joomla as CMS, as they already use it for their main website.

Host Universal have found managing content on the site through Joomla to be incredibly easy. In fact we just got an e-mail from the person managing the site, saying:

“Thanks for all the great training on the backend of this site - I've been involved in lots of websites and it's definitely the easiest to work with so far!!”

Green Quadrant specializes in implementing open source software, so it's hardly a surprise that we're using Joomla, but our experience on this project has confirmed to us again what a great platform it is to work with.