IHEU has a new interactive web site, bringing international Humanism closer to IHEU's member organisations, individual supporters and associates. Now we can share with everyone the latest news from IHEU and the international Humanist community. We invite your active participation through the new web site.

The Task

The iheu.org domain name was registered in 1997 and the web site has been active since 1999. Over the years, it has developed to become a vital medium for IHEU’s news and campaigns. Webmasters included Srinivas Katkoori, Sahana Kanjula, Alan Levin and Gea Meijers and we are very grateful to all of them.

Five years on, we saw the need to upgrade the web site to make it a two-way communications medium, more frequently updated and a more valuable resource for IHEU’s member organisations and supporters as well as other, more casual visitors.

However, we wanted to go further and allow the users of the web site to become its authors, enabling full participation and interaction. The concept was to make the web site a tool for member organisations and supporters, not just a broadcasting medium for IHEU.

New Design

The site has been completely reorganised and redesigned. We have added content that was not available on the old site, including the full text of the last 10 years’ International Humanist News, about 250,000 words. Hundreds of other articles are available to browse, search and download.

The new web site is organised into sections:

• News about IHEU and international Humanism on the front page and in its own section, with a news archive going back to 1999

• About IHEU, containing longer articles and archive material including IHEU’s minimum statement, the Amsterdam Declaration, a guide to humanist identity, how to contact IHEU, membership information, website help, IHEU constitution, publications and many other articles

• Humanist World is IHEU’s guide to world-wide Humanism, mainly in the form of a member directory, arranged geo-politically

• Campaigns covers IHEU’s successful efforts to free Dr Shaikh and other recent campaigns

• Conferences, including reports on the 2002 Jefferson Conference, the 2002 and 1999 World Humanist Congresses, other meetings, resolutions and speeches. We will report here on the 2005 World Humanist Congress in Paris

• UN & International, with reports from IHEU’s representatives at the United Nations, UNICEF, UNESCO, the Council of Europe and related bodies

• Social Action & Partners is a new venture facilitated by the web site. IHEU offers this new service to members and local organisations. We invite local organisations, members and others to use the "Submit Article" feature to publish details of specific needs or offers of practical or financial help. You can browse these proposals and make contact with local organisations to offer assistance in meeting those needs

• Events calendar includes IHEU’s events and other forthcoming dates of interest to humanists

• Live headlines from the BBC

We also offer our own live news feed via RSS and XML so that other web sites and news aggregators can subscribe to our news stories.

New Features

The new site has a number of new features, including:

• Search, enabling you to search the full text

• Comment, so you can comment online on the content

• Notifications, so you can receive a message when content of interest to you changes

• Recommend us to a friend

To get the best from some of these features, we ask you to register on the web site.

The most important feature is the ability for you to contribute to the site, online. Each section has a "Submit" feature where you can send us anything from a one-line news item or event for the calendar to a full article. Submitting a story or article is as easy as filling in a form.

We hope that member organisations, in particular, will use this feature to update and expand their entries in the Humanist World section. Submissions will be reviewed before publication.

We have also set up a new mailing list. If you were registered on one of the old IHEU mailing lists, you may already have received messages from the new system. To register on the new system, go to www.iheu.org/lists.

The new web site is hosted by Humanists.net, the web service provided by the Institute of Humanist Studies. We are very grateful to IHS for providing this service.

The original brief for the new web site, at the end of 2003, was to make a site with a consistent "look" and navigation that could be updated more easily, integrating all the desired functionality and adding features to make the site more attractive to visitors and useful to member organisations. We hope that we have succeeded and that we will be able to enhance the site and its facilities still further. Please visit the site and let us know what you think.

For the technically minded

We have completely rebuilt the site using a content management system (CMS). The CMS keeps all the content in a database and delivers it on demand, creating each page when needed. This makes it easy to maintain structured, predictable – and therefore intuitive – navigation, and a consistent "look and feel." In effect, our technical support provides the templates and you, the users, provide the content, using only an Internet connection, a web browser and a password.

The key features and benefits of our CMS are:

• Participation: Anybody can contribute, or comment on existing materials. Member organisations can write their own descriptions and even build their own mini-websites if they do not have a site of their own.

• Automation: New users can register themselves with just an email address check; similar processes apply for submitting articles.

• Editing: Authorised users can edit without assistance; other users can submit content but with a review process before publication.

• Browser-based editing: Anyone with permission can edit the website. They only need an Internet connection, a web browser and a password.

• Permissions: A flexible permission structure enables us to give different users permission to do different things.

• Template-based: users providing content do not have to worry about design and coding; and we can change the look of the site without editing the code.

• Extensibility: we can add new facilities as modules. Dozens of these are available and there are usually several possible approaches to meet a particular requirement.

• Database-driven: the system generates pages on the website as they are needed.

• Caching: the system stores pages that rarely change, avoiding the need to generate them from the database every time. This speeds up the web site and reduces the load on the server.

• Languages: there are facilities to adapt the website for other languages.

A message to the leaders of all IHEU member organisations

I would like to urge all IHEU member organisations to send us 500 words about their organisation, ideally with one or two pictures, for publication on the new IHEU web site. Please send this by email.

Roy Brown, President, IHEU