Amnesty International is the world’s leading human rights organisation and a global movement of over 10 million people, all working together to fight abuses of human rights through detailed research, determined lobbying and powerful global campaigns.
We’ve been working closely with the team at Amnesty for over five years now – firstly on a reusable framework which allowed them to launch multiple sites seamlessly, followed by the redevelopment of the company’s main website, amnesty.org. Drawing from lessons learnt by building, launching and supporting numerous sites with Amnesty over the years, more recently we began working closely with the team to develop a brand new initiative in the shape of an open source WordPress theme for the wider Amnesty International and WordPress community, and we’re thrilled to announce that the theme is now live and being utilised by over 30 websites already.
The new lightweight theme, aptly named Humanity, supports the idea of WordPress’ mission of democratising publishing and the freedoms that come with open source software, as well as providing the Amnesty movement with scalable digital solutions that are flexible, free-to-use and powered by valuable audience insights. Built using the innovative block editor, Gutenberg, as standard the theme comprises of a number of features aimed at streamlining the content creation process for non-development teams.
The project is also designed to reduce the duplication of development work across the movement and make it easier for website teams to work collaboratively to create content. Designed by and for human rights activists and charities, it provides a thoroughly designed and tested product that contains Amnesty’s visual identity (when used with the Amnesty Brand plugin) so that it can be easily used on a new websites.
The free-to-use theme is also fully extendable, which means that if it doesn’t meet the specific requirements for one of the many worldwide Amnesty teams, they can choose to fund additional development. In keeping with the open source approach, any added features can also then be shared with others using the theme, facilitating continuous expansion and improvement.
“It was always the plan for us to go open-source with our website theme. Open source is all about collaboration and community, and we’re really looking forward to working with other individuals and companies that share our vision and values.”
Austin, Amnesty International
We’re thrilled to see the new theme live at https://wordpresstheme.amnesty.org/ where you can find out more, view the feature list and contact the Amnesty Web Ops team. It can also be accessed on GitHub at https://github.com/amnestywebsite/humanity-theme
