Buddhafield is a charity that runs camping retreats, a festival and a field café as a Buddhist practice context. It emerged out of the efforts of a meditation teaching team going to Glastonbury Festival in the mid-nineties. They part-supported their activities by running a café and then branched out into running retreats and subsequently their own festival.
www.buddhafield.com is a custom designed content management system (CMS) written in PHP. Whilst there are a number of off-the-shelf systems available for free (for example WordPress, Drupal or Joomla) all extensively customisable, an original system was necessary to address the organic nature of Buddhafield.
The focus of the system is a configuration file. Sections of the site are operated by either a data ‘switch’ or date trigger, and these are operated in the configuration file. Put simply, rather than have to create lists of information to update or correct as the Buddhafield season progresses (an approach prone to oversight and error), a change to a single setting means that any word, paragraph or page can be set to display only particular information consistent with that setting. Thus, throughout the website, Buddhafield Festival tickets can be consistently declared as either not yet available, on sale, or even sold out simply by changing the sale status switch to be in either the unavailable, sale or sold states.
The checkout system was also written specifically for this website. It also operates on the principle that some things (retreats and festival tickets in particular) are only available at certain times of the year, but that Buddhafield needs a consistently accurate web presence all year round.
Further, if something is only actionable from a particular date onwards (the Festival Healing Garden Co-ordinators don’t start taking enquiries until April 1, for example) then a change in displayed information can be triggered simply by the due date arriving.
Current development work
Because the Buddhafield community is based around a network of geographically dispersed volunteers, clarity about who to contact and how best to contact them is very important. A problem for many volunteers is that, long after they’ve stopped co-ordinating a particular team — say the Festival Decor Crew — they can find themselves being pursued with enquiries as their email address gets passed on. This is frustrating for contactees too, who just get the runaround.
The website aims to abstract a role from a person. This means that its an email form that people go to on our website, they’re not simply tracking down an address. Forms can display information specific to that recipient — if necssary — but in any case displaying the destination address is not necessary for a contact to be made. And if the recipient moves on, it’s only the configuration of the form that needs to be changed.
More
As well as the website, you could have a look at out Flickr account or join us on Facebook