Many Pies

Many Pies

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Blackbaud NetCommunity and creating new subsites

We have two main websites, one, wycliffe.org.uk bears the name of our organisation, and the other vision2025.org, our main campaign. We set up our NetCommunity donation pages with the branding from our vision2025.org site and got a Blackbaud web designer to reproduce the way that site looked in NetCommunity.

We've now created a donations page using the look of our wycliffe.org.uk site. A colleague of mine did most of the work, and because in NetCommunity you can use HTML in the layouts, template, pages and parts, it was mostly a matter of cutting and pasting the HTML. However I did find some snags as I tried to make pages on the two sites look identical. NetCommunity adds some extra HTML to the stuff you create so that it can implement its features, and some of those use tables, hence my previous post on CSS styles in tables. I managed to get the two looking pretty identical, apart from a bit of background colour showing when you first go to the donations page. There are still a couple of differences:
  • Site search doesn't work from NetCommunity, using our existing script. It has its own search facility, but that will only search the Net Community server.
  • The donations "part" is quite wide, so I had to spread into the third (right hand) column to fit it in.
  • The favicon for the pages that look like wycliffe.org.uk is the same as the vision2025.org ones, but I think I can fix that. Update: Because you don't have access to the <head> part of the HTML you can't specify that. However I did find that BBNC automatically puts in references to images/favicon.ico. Some browsers, like Chrome, don't fall back to the sitewide facicon.ico if that isn't there, so to make your icon appear on those browsers, copy your favicon.ico file to the directory \program files\NetCommunity\images.


Spot the difference

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

It's hard to believe any nonprofit is willing to spend the ridiculous fees that BlackBaud charges for it's substandard NetCommunity product.

I recommend anyone using this should consider switching to NPEngine, which is 1/10th the setup costs without ANY recurring rates. Plus, it's just a superior product with far better customer support.