Innovation Bank
http://www.innovationnorth.co.uk
Brief
To create a social networking site for Leeds Metropolitan University’s Innovation North faculty. The site should enable students, staff and external industry professionals to propose final year project ideas and to form project teams in a virtual environment. The primary goals of the site should be to facilitate networking between students, and to build bridges between interested employers and emerging talent within the faculty.
Implementation
The Drupal framework was used for this project. This allowed for rapid development of a prototype, created within several weeks, which was used to run the faculty’s 2008/09 final year projects. Feedback from the prototype’s 850+ users was vital in shaping the specification for the final version of the site, which was launched for the following academic year (September 2009). A focus group, which included 12 local IT companies, also shaped the functionality spec in the early stages of development.
The core Drupal framework was expanded with more than 30 contributed modules. Many these modules were adapted with considerable modifications to suit the project’s needs and specifications. For instance, the User Relationships Drupal module did not support one way relationships and was therefore rewritten to support reciprical one-way relationships (like Twitter “followers”). Drupal’s Organic Groups modules were used to create private project areas where members of each project team could share resources via private forum areas, blogs and privately aggregated RSS content.
Several other modules were created from scratch. These included;
- Account Types: to support the various user type requirements
- Innovation Project: customisation of all project related forms
- IB search: customisation of all search forms
- Reports: generate .CSV output for staff
- Notifications: send alerts to admins for content awaiting moderation
The site content is re-indexed every four hours via cron. Cron is also used to automate daily database back-ups.
As this project included two members of the development team a Subversion server was set up and TortoiseSVN client was used to manage the code throughout the development process.