River Network

The project was a complete ground up rebuild of many separate web properties in an effort to simplify and consolidate River Network's web initiatives. Starting with as many as five Drupal 5.x instances for various programs, a separate ecommernce solution, a custom php resource library application, two legacy main websites one in some very cold fusion, I worked with River Network's self assigned web team to map out all the existing web properties and functionality to identify what would need to be migrated to the new Drupal platform. Acquia has written an excellent case study of this project you can download in PDF format here.

From here we walked through fucntional specifications and wireframing to determine new functionality and needs that could be built using the latest cutting edge release of the Acquia Drupal 6.x distribution. This allowed for rapid prototyping of ideas and functional requirements to determine the best approach for various needs.

Through this research and planning phase we realised the site would need to have a focus on simple user input for the various departments that would want access to add and edit content while still offer rich layouts and fucntionality. This lead to some careful planning that allowed for the theming layer of Drupal to handle rich layout with smart templates while offering a simplified text adn widget editing interface for novice users.

Through the powerful combination of the Content Construction Kit modules CCK and custom theming we achieved a clean balance of form and function while allowing for ease of content management.

More details to come...