Escaping in HTML - the Shielded Site badge

Sometimes in web development, you get a chance to make an actual difference. Often, the things you build/fix/upgrade are prettier pictures, better blogs or shinier shops - but today’s module is one we are quite proud of and excited to share, as it can have a real impact on the lives of women living in an abusive household.

Women’s Refuge New Zealand have created a Shielded Site, a discrete button that can live on any webpage and allow someone access to the contents of the Women’s Refuge site itself. The key to it is that https://womensrefuge.org.nz/ won’t show up in their browser history - this is important as one of the ways an abusive relationship can manifest is in tracking the person, both in real life and online.

When Katie came across the site and shared it in Slack, Andrew’s first thought was to make it a SilverStripe module for simple inclusion - inspired by Simon’s work on the pride.codes module. That lead us to create a simple module to import the necessary Javascript. You can install it by running composer require andrewandante/womens-refuge-shield and then selecting one of the options in the CMS dropdown (for a large or small tab at the top of the site). Alternatively, you can use a template variable $WomensRefugeShieldButton to insert it anywhere you like; in the footer, header, sidebar - wherever makes sense for your site. There’s a version for SilverStripe 3 and for SilverStripe 4, so no excuses!

What may seem like a small and inconsequential module for you may literally save someone’s life, so please consider adding the Women’s Refuge Shielded Site to your next project.

Being and feeling safe is a basic human right, so SilverStripe would like to offer our thanks to Saatchi & Saatchi who originally built the project as a pro bono exercise, and of course to Women’s Refuge New Zealand who have inspired us with their ongoing dedication.

This blog post was co-authored by Katie Elks and Andrew Aitken-Fincham

Security note: 

The Shielded Site button includes content and scripts from a third-party source. Including content from third-party sources is a potential security risk, and should be reviewed accordingly by your digital team.