Anyone driving in Johannesburg in the past few weeks may have been struck by the colourful and bold advertising of The Shabbos Project, which has its big weekend on 23 and 24 October.
The idea was inspired by South African Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein’s call for the entire Jewish community “to keep one Shabbos completely”. Shabbat, or Shabbos (which means “rest” or “cessation”), is Judaism’s day of rest and seventh day of the week. A key feature of the Shabbos is that observant Jews refrain from doing any work during the period, which lasts approximately 25 hours from sunset on a Friday to just after sunset on a Saturday.
The majority of Jews in South Africa and around the world are non-observant, which makes the project incredibly ambitious.
Earlier this year, Mama Creative approached Flow to help it develop www.theshabbosproject.org, the central digital platform for the project. Flow took Mama’s strong creative concept and design, and implemented it using the latest website development standards.
The site boasts a multi-language and multi-site architecture, with translations in German, Spanish, French, Hebrew, Italian, Portuguese and Russian. It also has over 20 regional “mini sites” and over 300 Shabbos events listed around the world. As the big Shabbos weekend approaches, this number is likely to grow.
The site is responsive and demonstrates the strength of CraftCMS, a Yii-based PHP/MySQL content management system.
“We chose Craft because it has strong localisation support,” says project manager Richard Frank. “We created a number of custom modules, including a function that allows administrators to send and receive text from the translation agency automatically. We like to call it ‘one-click’ translation, and it’s far better than copying and pasting translations into the control panel.”
Another great feature is the radius search for events. “This is especially important for the Jewish community who need to find venues within walking distance of their homes. You simply enter in your address, and the website finds events close to you.”
The site integrates with Salesforce, a customer relationship management system that enables the Mama Creative team to manage its over 5 000 partner relationships. “As soon as a user or partner registers on the site, their data is synchronised to Salesforce using the Salesforce REST-based API,” says Frank.
Users can register on the site using Facebook, Twitter and Google+, and are able to create and promote their events via the website. Partners are using the website to promote their regions, from Melbourne to Mexico.
“The Shabbos Project team never rests (except on Saturdays!),” says Mama Creative head Laurence Horwitz. “We are always looking at pushing boundaries to reach and inspire more and more ground partners. In Flow we found a brilliant and like-minded partner that has really helped us bring the Project to the world.”
