Department of Chemistry, UGA

From 2009-2010, I worked with the Deparment of Chemistry at the University of Georgia to create a new public-facing site for their unit. The site at the time was about 10 years old, and they were looking for something new. I discussed options with them, including Content Management Systems for maintenance, and it came down to Drupal or Expression Engine. But after working with Expression Engine for a time, it became clear that Expression Engine would not provide the power and flexibiity that they would need for their site. As a result, I built the site in Drupal 6. 

I provided them with multiple design concepts, and they chose a variation of one of them to be the final version. But, they also requested some particular functions designed to enhance the user's experience and allow users to find the people they were looking for and see the kinds of research they were doing. The four main features of note were:

• An interactive display of researchers on the Research page that would allow users to quickly mouse over the research areas and limit the research roster to those that fit that category. This required some Javascript/jQuery programming, some complex Views, and some creating CSS.
• Two lists of publications for each researcher: a short list and a full list upon request. Using the Bibliography module, we were able to pull in each researcher's library of publications and sort them. And using customized form fields and some view preprocessing, this was accomplished with minimal maintenance on the part of the researchers.
• A special search function for people on the site. Using the Custom Search module, this was achieved rather easily.
• A complex Seminars system, whereby when a Seminar was added, emails were sent out to different parties, depending upon their role in the system, including an email to the presenter(s) to submit an abstract. These Seminars have a special logic to determine their display on blocks and pages, based upon whether they are external or internal presenters, date, etc.