A Sad Day for PlayPumps.org Site

Today I woke up to check the sites I worked on that I was getting ready to submit to a few awards and when I got to PlayPumps.org I at first thought something happened to the DNS or the site template on Backbaud Sphere (Kintera Sphere) only to finally find out they did it on purpose.

Here is the site Before (left) & After (right):

PlayPumps.org was the main site for PlayPumps International, with the primary portion of the site hosted on Kintera Sphere (now Blackbaud Sphere) which manages all of their online forms, donation and constituency as well as most of their content web pages.

The blog, gallery, and the videos were all managed on a sub domain blog.playpumps.org which was running an instance of WordPress which I had customized while working for Changing Our World Inc.

The blog functioned straight forward like a blog, that is the main tool in WordPress anyway so the only change there was to styling and layout. For the gallery the Flickr API was used to create a custom layout and pull in all of the photos, comments and tags used on Flickr. The images could then link to a larger version in a light box or to the original image in Flickr whichever they decided. The video was all YouTube based, so using their API I pulled in all of the information you could see or want from YouTube including the video, rating, YouTube link, embed code for the video and the description used on YouTube for the video.

On the PlayPumps homepage there was a nice flash element that rotated through 4 tabs which could have their text and content changed via an XML document on the server. This means by editing a single XML file they can change the text on the tabs, the link to the button and the url for the image. Also in the flash was a sample pump, basically it was the pump on the left with a water tower on the right, the tower filling based on a value in the XML file to the level of donations received.

In the end this is all gone, and what is going on no one knows. There has been no outward communication from PlayPumps or parent Case Foundation about the changes happening at PlayPumps International. The only news is that they are investing in Water for People (waterforpeople.org).

After all of the brainstorming, strategies, suggestions and helping hands held out to them, it has all be denied. Anyway, it seems my hopes for this organization are falling away faster and faster…