Duncan and Grace first set up The Bailey Head in Oswestry nine years ago and we were delighted they asked us to help with their website.
Over the last nine years we’re watched in awe. They’ve used their site to promote the thousands of different beers they have sold since then. During the Covid lockdowns, we helped them develop an online shop. This allowed them to continue to sell superb beers from around the country to their neighbours by delivery or collection.
Win Elections with TYPO3
The Liberal Democrats were founded in 1988 as the successor to the Liberal Party, the oldest political party in the UK. The Liberal Democrats had been the third party of UK politics through until 2015, when they lost many seats.
In 2024 at the General Election they won 72 seats, more than they have ever held, and are now very clearly the third party in the UK Parliament again.
When the Liberal Democrats initially came up with the specification for what would turn out to be their Fleet website system, simple bilinguality for the Welsh State and Welsh Local Party sites was a key requirement.
The need helped guide us towards Typo3 as a platform. It was designed for the job, which in this case was to make it simple to build in both English and Welsh languages and switch between them.
We’ve built Fleet for our Welsh sites to offer that option. We’ve worked with a translator and the Welsh Party so that the “scaffolding” of sites automatically translates between pages. However, we’ve also made it easy for site editors to create the rest in both languages – from menu items to full pages and news articles.
Context is also key, and its not just the text that can vary between versions. It maybe that there is a better picture to illustrate the Welsh language version of an article than the one used on the English version. You can change that too. And the descriptive text like alt tags, descriptions and even url click-throughs can also be set by language: brilliant!
We’re regularly asked why we don’t use automatic translation of content blocks from English to Welsh. Answer: it still sounds terrible. An automatic translation will generally give the “flavour” but also be absolutely obvious to a native Welsh speaker. Want a Welsh translation? You need a Welsh speaker!
Three members of the Prater Raines developer team took an epic journey (OK, maybe not epic, but we did have to catch 7 different trains) to Karlsruhe in the Black Forest to bask in the glorious sunshine* at the annual TYPO3 Developer Days conference.
* And a teeny bit of rain, thunder and lightning to keep us on our toes.
We learned about CSS, deployment, testing, time management and upcoming improvements to the platform and we met other TYPO3 developers from around the world.
Automated testing is a great thing and something we’re always looking at doing much, much more of. But sometimes it’s just unavoidable that errors in third party systems slip through and make it onto the production website. That’s especially the case for minor bugs that generate warning notices but have no noticeable impact on the site functionality. We can pick up on and deal with these snags before they become bigger problems thanks to our world class server monitoring, and open source means we can fix the problem upstream much more quickly.
Since we created our first “Email Your MP” website in 2018, the service has expanded to support multiple organisations but has remained relatively focused on national campaigns. The API behind it has expanded somewhat to include additional MPs, such as those Northern Ireland, but has remained relatively static in terms of scope.
That changed recently thanks to various development requests. Firstly, the Liberal Democrats needed a new version of their postal voting page. Secondly, a new client wished to use additional data, alongside MP contact details, as part of their campaign. The result? Two new API endpoints and changes to our Fleet and WordPress platforms to make use of them.
Salesforce has a handy tool to insert, update, and delete bulk data from CSV, XML, or JSON files. Salesforce says the tool only works on Windows and MacOS.
This can only be for lack of a QA team because not only is the tool written in platform-independent Java, but the download includes all the code you need to run it on Linux including a secret install script.
Here’s how to get it working in a few easy steps.
As Germany moves away from closed source software to a strategy using TYPO3 for all government websites, I joined Jana Höffner and Nikolai Jaklitsch at this year’s T3CON in Düsseldorf to discuss software in government and how Open Source is the only way to guarantee digital sovereignity, foster local talent and create a digital economy.
Following this year’s review by the Boundary Commissions for England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, the next General Election will be fought on new constituencies for the first time since 2010.
Full data isn’t published by the ONS yet. But the Lib Dems use our well-loved online interface to Salesforce, Lighthouse, to manage selection processes for election candidates and need to have the new constituency data to plan for the next GE, in addition to the existing constituencies on which any by-elections before the next GE will still be fought.
In order to import the new data into Salesforce, they naturally turned to Prater Raines for our expertise in political geography and API and database design.
If you work with political geography data and Salesforce, need your own organisation structure mapped, or your online campaign would benefit from enabling supporters to email MPs based on their geographic location, get in touch.
Prater Raines are delighted that we have been selected to develop “Fleet”, a complete new website platform for the Liberal Democrats.
Prater Raines have been working with the Liberal Democrats since 2002. In that time, we’ve provided up to 300 local party websites through our custom built Foci service. So building on this expertise, we’re excited to be working alongside the Liberal Democrats on Fleet, their next generation website service.