Portfolio

Hopefully this blog entry will help a few people overcome some of the hurdles in setting up a donations system. We are a drupal shop so all the following is for drupal 6.

The Institute on Governance(IOG) is located here in Canada’s capital city, Ottawa. Its vision is to be the pre-eminent, independent Canadian source of knowledge, research and advice on governance and its continuous improvement. In the past 20 years they have undertaken over 1000 projects in Canada and 35 other countries.

Clumps is a module that I have just written and will eventually be releasing. Its currently about 90% finished. The name was hastily chosen from a google search for a synonym to section. It is also still up for debate so feel free to comment if you can think of a good name.

All relatively good ideas start with a relatively complex, or annoying, problem.

Just Vision is an organization that, through award-winning media, community outreach and an array of educational tools, informs, connects and engages people in Palestinian-Israeli civilian efforts to resolve the conflict nonviolently.  

OpenConcept was lucky enough to work with this passionate organization to help them develop a truly unique Drupal-based website. Just Vision had previously implemented another CMS solution and as such, had an existent, complex database that linked interviews from a diverse selection of 'peacebuilders' on a variety of themes. Developing the appropriate taxonomies and linking interviews with themes, footnotes, glossary terms and profiles was challenging but something that Drupal was able to handle well using content types and taxonomies.

You can visit the Just Vision website at http://www.justvision.org

OpenConcept has used a number of solutions for time tracking and project management over the years; Basecamp, along with a couple of iterations of a Drupal 5-based system based on the Worktracker module. OpenConcept has grown considerably in the last couple of years, and with additional staff, bigger projects, and the historical accumulation of information each system began verging on unworkable as we transitioned to the next.

Recognia provides technical analysis products (interpreted chart recognition) to large brokerage firms worldwide. They help the brokerage firms attract, retain and engage traders by providing actionable research tools. 

Recognia came to OpenConcept because they were trying to enhance their web presence with a new website that is more engaging to users, clearly defines the company mandate and product offerings and enables their internal team to take control of content entry.

T-Base Communications was looking to enhance their web presence by implementing a new design, by upgrading the accessibility of their website and by improving the simplicity and power that their CMS was able to provide.

They chose Drupal as their platform of choice because of its intuitive content management interface, its inherent built-in accessibility features and its growing popularity amongst organizations looking for a hands-on approach to the development of their website content. They decided to go with OpenConcept because of our expertise in Drupal as well as the area of accessibility. We were able to deliver a website that adhered to the WCAG 2.0 AA web content accessibility guidelines, as outlined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The T-Base website successfully validates and can be checked using W3C's markup validation service.

I was fortunate enough to be able to attend the Ottawa Book Launch for Transforming Power, that was held at the Raw Sugar Cafe earlier today.  The cafe was definitely packed with people who came to both see Judy & celebrate Octopus Books' 40th Anniversary.  The venue was intimate and everyone was interested in hearing from Judy.  We have been doing the Website for Octopus Books now for probably 8 years (Krishna & I put up what was at the time a fairly complex site at that time) and also helped Judy Rebick put together her site over the past couple of months.

We took a leadership role in supporting Judy's site because we saw the potential for this project to mobilize the social justice movement in Canada.  When we (Krishna & I) first worked with Judy it was when we helped to launch rabble.ca back in 2001.  Rabble.ca has done a lot to help to focus left leaning media and discussion since that time and it was with rabble.ca that we were involved in our first advocacy campaign to build a petition to release Jaggi Shing. 

The goal of this project was the establishment of an online collaborative work and learning environment for a group of distributed learners in the Living Leadership, the Executive Leadership Program of the Canada School of Public Service.

The participants are executives from the public sector using the website to access information, documents and participant information. Each participant has a blog as well as a customized learning plan page maintained by the staff. The website is bilingual and features a calendar of events for the program. These elements were required to fulfill the Living Leadership Program’s blended learning needs.

This was a WordPress to Drupal 6 conversion for an organization focused on environmental challenges and solutions.

Using panels and aggregator modules, we created a system for filtering incoming news feeds to determine which ones are shown on the front page. Normally, aggregator feeds appear unfiltered, but this organization wanted to control what external links are visible on the website. A custom panel shows the incoming feeds with admin links for choosing which feeds show in the custom feed blocks.