Drupal

For some time, Sean Larkin of ThinkShout and I have been collaborating on projects, none bigger than Watershed Now, a Drupal distribution targeted at conservation groups. I am not being modest when I say that I have played a bit role and Sean has been the main force behind the concept and implementation. As with any project that is not directly billable, though, it needs some dedicated funding to help move it forward and that's why we are applying for a Knight News Challenge grant. 

Watershed Now

Watershed Now is a Drupal distribution developed to support the common content management, social media, online advocacy, fundraising, and mapping needs of conservation organizations.

Among other features, Watershed Now provides easy-to-use content management tools, email-to-blog features, online event registration, donation pages and reports, online mapping tools, e-petition tools with legislative lookups, and advanced multimedia and social network integration. The distribution also ships with three stock Drupal themes in a variety of color options. Watershed Now websites are highly-customizable. For example, there are more than 60 available variations on the homepage layout.

Watershed Now is free and open source. The project is hosted on Drupal.org at: http://drupal.org/project/watershednow. The code is maintained on GitHub at: https://github.com/thinkshout/watershednow.

A very common request I get lately is for a banner containing a series of image transitions, often on the home page. Certainly a fairly simple feature, one I've already solved in different ways, E.g., here, here, and here. So when I had a similar need, I decided to finally build a stable and flexible module I could easily reuse. But as any good Drupal citizen knows, better to see what's already out in the contrib space before recreating the wheel. I also like to scour the landscape for any lateset and greatest libraries before a new project, in this case for JQuery image transitions. I came across Nivo Slider, which quickly led me to the corresponding Drupal module. Combine this with CCK (imagefield), Imagecache, and Views, bundle it into a Feature, and voila, a 1 hour flexible and reusable banner transition tool.

Final recipe is as follows.

I've recently become more involved with map scripting in my work on LCREP, Save Our Gulf, Geomeridian, and a few others in the works. One commonality amongst all the projects was the need to display geocoded data on a map, a problem solved many times over. When I began work on the first of these projects this past spring, the state of mapping in Drupal boiled down to these tools.

Mapedelic

Mapedelic is the name given to the powerful and well established duo of Location and Gmap. The former stores address and coordinates as either CCK fields or in its own schema and can geocode addresses when called upon. The latter then renders those locations on a Google map. Gmap also plays well with Views. Both these modules have large install bases and have been in use for some time.

Pros

• Large, well established user base
• Stability
• Geocoding of addresses

Cons

• Location paradigm of collecting addresses is not applicable for more diverse use cases.
• Geocoding has some problems when updating addresses.
• You can't change between a fields and node based approach. Since fields is by far more flexible, and the future, there's lots of code debt to the pure nodes approach that most people don't need.
• Gmap uses the legacy v2 Google Maps API.
• Configuration and customization of the Gmaps output can be difficult.
• You're locked into using Google Maps.

Save Our Gulf is an initiative of Waterkeeper Alliance to support the Gulf Waterkeepers directly impacted by the BP oil disaster. One of the main reasons I started Level OS was to leverage my professional skills to help organizations who were doing work I wanted to support. Rarely has there been a group more deserving of help, or a disaster more devastating to a region, than the recent Gulf oil spill. The Waterkeeper Alliance needed a tool to report on the damage being caused by the pill, and tell the true story of what was, and still is, happening in the Gulf. With the reporting tool we developed, volunteers can easily submit geo-tagged pollution reports complete with photo and video uploads. Hopefully these reports will ensure that those responsible will pay for the damage that has been caused. Some notes about the site.

• Reports near each other are clustered together on a "nearby" view, available from every report page.
• Map icons are customized based on the status of a site, E.g., impacted by oil.
• The site uses a new version of the Drupal Mapstraction module, which I maintain.
• Videos are uploaded to YouTube directly via the video upload module.

Big thanks to ThinkShout, my partner on the project, for brining it my way and the incredible hard work and devotion he demonstrated.

Level OS recently partnered with ThinkShout to develop an online mapping tool for the Lower Columbia River Estuary Partnership (LCREP).

Maps.lcrep.org enables users to track site locations where activities have occurred, and to download information related to those sites. Filtering options are available, allowing users to identify groups of sites that share common attributes. All sites can be accessed from this main page, but for finer detail and/or filtering options for each Program Area, users can navigate to the respective Program Area pages.

The primary technical challenge was developing a simple and flexible mapping tool allowing users to filter restoration sites based on their categories, without reloading the page. We turned to the Mapstraction map scripting framework, which allows users to interact with any of the leading mapping providers using a single code base. In the process, I took over the development and maintenance of the Mapstraction Drupal module. The module makes it very simple to create views of geo tagged data, and we were able to leverage the filtering capabilities of the Mapstraction library.