Canadian Paraplegic Association Ontario

CPA Ontario's mission is to assist persons with spinal cord injuries and other physical disabilities to achieve independence, self-reliance and full community participation. They were founded after WWII by vets with spinal cord injuries. Their site serves as a vehicle for education and outreach and increasingly is being used to assist other communication channels within the organization.

I began working with CPA Ontario in March 2008. They were hosted on a proprietary system that was slow, expensive to host, inflexible and expensive to make changes to. The new communications coordinator had previously had some experience with Drupal and knew it was what they wanted. Also from that previous experience she was sure she wanted as much 'out of the box' Drupal as possible - her previous Drupal project had gotten bogged down because of a lot of customizations.

For the first phase, we customized a stock drupal theme (B7) to get the new site running as soon as possible. The accessibility requirements were not very specific but we had the help of Jeff Orchard and I learned about and implemented quite a range of nifty pieces of html and javascript to help people who have limited use of mice and keyboards. The migration from the old system proved challenging because of the inability of the provider to export their data but much of the old content ended up being not very up-to-date or useful.

In March 2009 we hired Andrew at Doublenaut to do a new custom design, and in the course of implementing it, and new intranet-type features for staff, we split off a separate "secure" site. We also added CiviCRM to the secure site to enable development staff to communicate with potential fundraisers and are gradually expanding those functions.