Overview
Georgetown wanted a centralized place for current students and alumni to gather and share news and discussions. The project included a home page view with various tweets, discussions and news content displayed via styled bubbles that paged through all the content on the site via Ajax. The second view was a four-column dashboard view that also employed Ajax calls to hide and show selected content. Overall, the project was designed to be graphically unique and user-friendly, and every aspect of the site was meant to be sleek and engaging. It’s a beautiful example of what a unique Drupal site can look like.
Challenges
In a word: Ajax. The entire project was Ajax-driven in order to provide a seamless user experience. A number of pieces of custom code were needed to achieve the overall look and feel the client wanted. The dashboard was especially interesting due to a large number of custom exposed filters, as well as hiding/showing columns depending on results.
Solutions
In order to complete such a complex site, Drupal Connect implemented a number of custom and contributed pieces of code. Some of the common modules were:
- Views
- Panels
- jQuery
- CCK
- ImageCache
At Drupal Connect, we try to make use as much of the community code as possible in order to keep custom code and time at a minimum. This project made extensive use of the modules provided by the community as well as some custom code to type these together in order to meet the specifications set by the client.