Shriver Center Unveils New and Improved Website

(Chicago)—The Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law’s website, www.povertylaw.org, is now easier to to use and more engaging for visitors. “The combination of a strong technological infrastructure, a clean and usable design, and the Shriver Center’s sophisticated content makes povertylaw.org a flagship site for the nonprofit legal aid community,” says David Eads, the system administrator.

The site is a collaboration between Enfold Systems LLC (enfoldsystems.com), ClearNoodle Design (clearnoodle.com), and Democracy In Action (democracyinaction.org). Enfold Systems helped the Shriver Center implement its Entransit publishing software, which allows Web content providers to leverage the speed and power of the Zope 3 application server for presentation and the Plone content management system for creating and editing content.

Enfold Systems, the Shriver Center, and Democracy In Action all support open source software. The first open source project released from the collaboration is a toolkit developed by Enfold Systems. The toolkit enables content management systems based on the Python programming language to integrate seamlessly with Democracy In Action’s advocacy tools (http://www.python.org/pypi/deminaction/0.2).

The site makes innovative use of RSS syndication for the legal sector. (RSS is a standard for publishing regular updates of Web-based content.) The site now offers RSS feeds for most of its content, including newsletters, substantive areas under advocacy, Clearinghouse Review, and cases in the law library. All of the case documents in the Shriver Center’s Poverty Law Library are now available for download free of charge and easily tracked via RSS. The Clearinghouse Review Web page features an improved, streamlined subscription system powered by Democracy In Action.

With the launch of its improved website, the Shriver Center continues to be at the forefront of information technology in the legal aid community. The site furthers the Shriver Center’s mission to provide leadership, training, and information services to legal aid advocates.

April 3, 2006