Screens, Research and Hypertext

IBP's Component Content Management System

The International Budget Partnership’s Open Budget Survey is cool for all sorts of reasons. The page-to-PDF bit is one of them. The fact that they’ve also effectively turned Drupal into a component content management system is another.

A selection of screenshots from the International Budget Partnership's Open Budget Survey, a report built up from modular content and a complex set of rules for combining the modules based on an uploaded dataset.

You can read more about that at On Think Tanks.

make-public

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Transclusion and URLs

It is possible to combine approaches—the International Budget Partnership has done this in Drupal.

Think Tanks and the Body Field Problem

Generate a PDF from HTML. Yes, there is print CSS. But many think tanks need more than that. A lot of policymaking still happens face-to-face. Putting a Printed Thing on a Minister’s desk at the start of a conversation carries real weight, which means that any sort of PDF you generate needs to look like something that has been professionally typeset. The International Budget Partnership does this quite well. Here’s the HTML. And the PDF, autogenerated from the HTML.

Back to WonkComms and Superheroes

Our tools aren’t really up to standards—though some are getting closer. Our processes are still mostly geared toward print. And our organizational cultures are still (mostly) primed to privilege the big report. Changing that requires a Hulk-sized lift.

Version Control and Transclusion

The International Budget Partnership takes this approach one step further, using Drupal's tokening system to dynamically assemble prose passages country reports based on a spreadsheet full of data values.

IBP's Component Content Management System