Originally a free standing website, Better Rural Buses was ported over to Ourlocality.org when the domain was due to expire, to keep the project as a demonstration. Now it is only available as fragments via the Web Archive project.
Functionally, the site was intended to allow anyone in the street (or a field for that matter – that is what you get in rural areas) and from their desk, assess and rate, and also comment on and upload pictures of their local bus stop to provide a report on its condition. Useful info was brought in dynamically with web magic, including e.g. Next Bus info and directions. This was a crowd sourcing project – a bit like Fix My Street – but without a budget built over a weekend or so.
Bus stops pages were created using a custom post type in WordPress, using the plugin Toolset and the basic post templates or views were created at the same time. The post type had 2 custom taxonomies, location and stop type, which allowed one to sort the hail and ride stops from the standard ones, and obviously pull together information by location. Continue reading “How was the Better Rural Buses site built?”