Freshleaf Portfolio - Linaro

Creating an online community resource

Linaro™ is a Not For Profit organisation led by ARM and Canonical, the makers of the Ubuntu operating system, in conjunction with a number of technology companies including IBM, Samsung and Texas Instruments. Set up to make embedded open-source development easier and faster, the organisation needed an online resource to act as its core; and because of our wide experience in creating accessible technology websites, Freshleaf was selected as a development partner.

Balancing technology with accessibility

With the relatively tight timescales in mind, we worked closely with ARM to come up with a suitable design for the site. The key to the design was striking the right balance between presenting a level of 'tech' which would interest the development community, and keeping an accessible feel to appeal to a wider audience, including potential investors and sponsors. The wealth of technical information available at www.linaro.org speaks for itself so all we had to do was come up with a compelling design and a clean, clear layout for easy navigation of the site.

An open-source platform for an open-source project

Linaro is an open-source project so an open-source Content Management System was required, and drawing on our experience with various CMS, we recommended Silverstripe as a good fit for this project. After installing the system and converting our site designs into templates, we also customised Silverstripe so that it could fulfil all of Linaro’s functional requirements. One such requirement was to tailor the Silverstripe forum so that it would accept logins from engineers’ existing Open ID accounts – meaning that they could bring their profiles over from existing sites and not have to create a new account.

An interactive resource for the developer community

Linaro was created to pool together the resources offered by the organisation's corporate sponsors to create an online community for open-source developers. It contains a broad range of interactive tools including a blog, forum, events feed, calendar subscription and a wide range of downloadable content and tools - all of which we had to take into consideration when designing the website. The longer visitors spend on the website contributing to the blogs, forums and discussions the more useful a resource it becomes, so key to its success was the creation of an engaging website tailored to the needs of the users to ensure engagement is easy and appealing.

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