Technical Details of the Social Rights Website

Spip and Free Software

Spip is an easy-to-use publishing system for the web. We are using it on the Social Rights website mainly because Spip:

 .. aims readers and editors who have no previous technical experience with specialised tools, such as html, ftp, etc.

 .. simplifies collaborative work for organisations from 2 to 200 editors. Each editor has it’s own login and preferences and cannot modify the content from another editor.

 .. allows editors to format an article for the web is simple with the use of simple typographical shortcuts.

 .. supports more than 15 languages, including Bulgarian [1]. Each editor can select his/her preferred language when using the publishing tools.

 .. is developped and distributed as Free Software under the terms of the GNU General Public Licence (GPL), which provides the users of Spip with the freedom to use, modify/adapt and redistribute Spip. [2]

Spip templates

After two years of using Spip, Social Rights Bulgaria has developped templates in collaboration with the NGO-Bulgaria Gateway project.

The templates feature:

 A "light" text alternative version which is aimed at users navigating with the Lynx text browser, such as users who are blind and users with very slow Internet access.

 Printer-friendly page layout: navigation items are not shown when a page is printed [3].

 Different layouts for the front page, for sections and for articles. The layouts can be configured by administrators with the help of keywords via the "private area" for editors.

.. and many other features. For more information, please consult the English documentation available on the NGO-Bulgaria Gateway.

The templates also use icons made by Jakub ’Jimmac’ Steiner (icons used in the GNOME desktop environment).

Web standards

In order to ensure accessibility, the Social Rights Bulgaria website aims HTML 4.01 conformance, CSS and WAI Level A conformance as defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

Do not hesitate to contact us if you are experiencing technical difficulties.

Other software supporting the Social Rights Bulgaria

The Social Rights Bulgaria website is hosted on a GNU/Linux server running Apache, PHP and MySQL.

The Social Rights editors are proud to be using quality Free Software solutions such as the Debian GNU/Linux operating system, the Mozilla Firefox navigator, the Open Office suite, and the Evolution mail reader.

We thank the developers, testers and translators of the above software for making quality alternatives that facilitate our work. If your organisation is interested by such alternatives, contact us! We will be happy to share advice and experiences with you.