At the Shuttleworth Foundation we’re absolute open source enthusiasts on all levels, and we’re totally focused on making use of open source technologies and content as far as humanly possible. In the development of this website we’ve made use of a few popular open source systems and frameworks to bring the front end and back end of the website to life.

WordPress for content Management

For starters, our site is powered by none other than the extremely popular WordPress Content Management System. WordPress makes management, syndication and extension of our website simple and easy.

960 grid system for layout

The front end grid structure of our site was built with the CSS 960 grid system which allows for the quick building of grid layouts with a width of 960 pixels in column multiples of 12 & 16. It’s a system used by many theme and template developers to create rock solid layouts which are compatible with all A-grade browsers.

Aller & Cufon for fonts

We were satisfied with just the same old verdana or arial for our entire site’s font list, but still wanted to make use of open source fonts, for which we’ve chosen the clean and light Aller Typeface. It had enough of the personality we were after while still maintaining the clarity of a light Sans Serif font.

Using Cufon to generate the front end display of the Aller font in all major Browsers we think we’ve found the perfect combination. Cufion degrades gracefully on much older browsers to display regular systems fonts.

Jquery and more Jquery

The Jquery Javascript library has been employed to bring to life a number of the interactive features in various sections of our site including the featured Fellows and Projects as well as our flickr and twitter feeds, our sub-level menu and a few other bits and pieces. Everyone from Google to Mozilla makes use of Jquery which made the decision a no brainer for us.