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International Alert, Saferworld, FEWER

Three non-governmental organisations engaged in peacebuilding employed Urban Guru to help produce a guide to conflict sensitivity. Saferworld, International Alert and FEWER wanted to publish a manual to be distributed digitally and in paper form to organisations across the world which detailed conflict-sensitive approaches to development, humanitarian assistance and peacebuilding.

Requirements

• The system had to be usable for non-technical staff
• It had to be accessible from multiple offices
• It had simultaneously to produce web pages and high-quality print-ready PDFs
• The documents needed to include inline Illustrator diagrams and complex variable-width tables
  
• Regular updates were to be published, hence the need for an automated publishing system
• The system had to be able to expand to cope with multiple language versions
  

Strategy

Urban Guru developed an easy-to-use web-based content management and publishing system using Java, MySQL and XML technologies.

Since the content was being entered by people across several organisations most of whom had basic computer skills, the system used an intuitive web interface. However because the content was quite rich and required structured formatting, we used Interactive Tools' htmlArea rich text editor, with special extensions to allow for fine-tuning the print appearance of the text and inserting inline diagrams. These diagrams were automatically preserved for the print version and converted to web graphics for the web version.

The print version had to have a totally different appearance to the web version. This was achieved by holding the content in the database in XML format and applying separate stylesheets for the web and print version. The print production process was totally automated, requiring just a click of the 'publish' button to produce a PDF that could be sent directly to the printers.

Outcome

The final manual was entered into the system and published in a record one month. In addition to the time savings involved over a traditional print production process, the organisations saved money by not having to employ a typesetter. Should they wish to publish a revised or updated version of the manual, they can simply hit 'publish' and send the output to the printers.

The web version of the manual is available at http://pcia.fewer.org/

Here is an example of the PDF output:

Chapter 3 Module 3: Conflict-sensitive monitoring and evaluation (489kb)