United Nations Charter

2004-present
Technologies: PHP, MySQL

During a conversation about international law and current affairs, a friend and I realised we needed to consult the United Nations Charter. Visiting the United Nations site I discovered that the version they offered was far from accessible. The style of HTML in use limited the potential audience of the site and there were no search or cross-reference tools. I set out to offer an alternative.

The site makes use of a version of the Charter stored in a MySQL database. Pages are pulled from the database and displayed using PHP and the Smarty Template Engine. The database also has an extensive list of cross-references which are presented at the bottom of the page for a relevant article or chapter. The site offers trackback support so as to present a view of conversation taking place on the web around the charter, and incorporates a basic keyword search.

Future versions of the site will hopefully make use of content negotiation to transparently provide a multi-lingual interface, news stories about the UN, and enhanced discussion/annotation features.

Visit the site at: uncharter.org.