In my last CO-OP term, I got the opportunity to lead a project and start from scratch. St. John Ambulance hired me with the opportunity to develop a website as part of their new Youth Program initiative and was looking to add some e-learning and online interaction. As I had worked closely with the content developer of the program, Patricia Mahoney, I had gotten to know the requirements she had in mind for this web project as it wouldn’t just be a brochure web design.
Requirements:
- Private Groups on a per School/Community Group basis
- Wall posts
- Polls
- Calendar
- Annoucements
- Badges
- Quizzes
- Group blog, User Blog and Blog Approval ability.
- Login/Sign up
- Landing Page
- Group member visibility & privacy
- Windows Server 2012/IIS 8/MS SQL
- Admin Interface
With all these in mind and a time constraint of 4 months, I would be managing my own project with the Software Development Cycle. I got into the research phase right away and finding the right framework to base my project on would be key. Although I found many available such as modern PHP, Javascript and Ruby frameworks, developping everything from scratch would be susceptible to many errors and delay even with tutorials and resources. I wanted to make a professional recommendation which would allow me to make the time constraint and get aide from a community as I was the sole developer on the project.
Drupal was clear solution and offered many Modules, help from the community and a flexible Admin interface which were key in implementing my solution.
Key Modules:
- Boostrap
- JQuery
- Organic Groups + addons
- Calendar
- Panels/Views
- Privatemsg
- Rules
- PHP Filter
- Workbench
Drupal is a Content Management System (CMS) that offers vast customization and security all while being open source software. I was also able to add my own custom code and theming through PHP filter and JQuery/CSS files.
Although the site is not completely live, check out drupal.sja.ca
