California Against Slavery Launches | Sweet Thursday Web Development

The California Against Slavery (CAS) website has launched.

Project Requirements

CAS had a large spreadsheet of Organizations in California that help individuals who have been victims of human trafficking. The goal was to take the information in this spreadsheet and implement it into their website via a new custom WordPress theme so that users on the website would be able to find help in the areas where they live. CAS had several requests:

Make the information searchable
Allow users to filter the information by many different categories and sub-categories
Allow admins to add additional organizations into the backend of WordPress
Create a form that would allow new organizations to enter the information so that it goes into the backend of WordPress where an admin can look over the information and then okay it to be displayed on the website. I.e. CAS did not want to have to manually enter the information after a new organization fills out a form
Keep the site clean and easily readable

Challenges

Deciding how the information should be stored in WordPress was the biggest initial challenge. Much of web development with more complicated projects requires a lot of planning before one line of code is written. I knew we would use a custom post for organizations and then had to decide what bits of information would be best to save in a custom taxonomy (think category) as opposed to custom fields. Searching using custom taxonomies in WordPress is far more effective than searching using custom fields. With this decided the next big step was determining how to get over 1,400 organizations and all their varied content into the custom post, custom taxonomies and custom fields without having to manually enter it all.

WP All Import

After doing some research I found a great plugin called WP All Import. This is a fabulous plugin if you need to import lots of data into WordPress. It has numerous options and can handle very complicated information. It was a life saver and after 4 or 5 tests I was able to get the CSV file with over 1,400 organizations fully imported into WordPress.

Once this was completed the home page was coded so that different areas of California could be selected and show (via icons) what is available there.

This was a fun project for a very good cause. I worked with a designer and with two people from the CAS organization to put their vision on the web.