Stuff I've Worked On
I do a lot of subcontracting—developing someone else's design, for instance, or building a web front-end for an existing data-base application.
Working as part of a team is a good thing. All of the participants get to concentrate on what they do best and a group-mind, when the member's get along, can be a very smart thing.
But it sure messes with a portfolio because you can't just provide some URLs and say "I did that." So, in the interests of full disclosure I've included a little about my role in the project along with the screen shot and the URL. When working on a team, though, the result is always a product of team effort and it would be arrogant to pretend that I'm solely responsible for anything on these projects. Still, I did my part.
State of the States in Developmental Disabilities
http://sos.arielmis.net/ (in development)
I did a static site for this University of Colorado-affiliated project quite a few years ago and in-house staff had been maintaining it. They contacted me with a wish to provide an interactive chart/graph feature to better serve their users.
The site didn't meet the branding guidelines of the university and hadn't been updated as often as people would have liked, so we decided address both those issues by migrating the site to the Joomla! CMS (with a custom template), move it to a separate domain, host it off the university servers, AND build the charting/graphing feature.
We selected FusionCharts for the charting engine, with a small PHP application feeding the data and a jQuery script handling the AJAX controller. A pretty successful project, though it hasn't yet gone live.
StareCasing
This is a site built on the Wordpress platform, one generally used for blogs but very useful for a small, simple, dynamic website.
The site is especially attractive, to my eye. The template was initially done by someone else using Artisteer, a template-generating engine, which produces quality templates in the right hands (obviously) but which are bloated and difficult to modify.
I was called in to make some repairs and modifications to the template, which proved to be much more difficult thay anyone imagined, and to do a form with some JavaScript input validation. It was a difficult job, having to hack auto-generated code, but the end result is hard for me to fault.
Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute (RASEI)
This site was build with Joomla, using a custom template and several custom modules in order to achieve the functionality that the client required. The intention was to build it so that the site could be scaled up to deliver thousands of documents, an intention that provided the biggest design challange -- bigger, even, than the custom Joomla modules.
This is the only Joomla site I've worked on that required more than one template. Differences in one section of the site were causing the main template to become unmanageably complicated, so we built and deployed another for a few pages, despite the added maintenance load that causes.
City of Boulder Elections
http://www.bouldercolorado.gov/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=7466&Itemid=3800
Cam Marshall wrote a database application to ensure compliance with campaign finance laws during municipal elections in Boulder, Colorado. The city wanted a web-based front end to reduce the amount of staff time required to support the campaign committees, and so we built this, and wrapped it in the standard City of Boulder Joomla template.
It is a complicated application, written in PHP/MySQL with a lot of JavaScript, and allows campaign staff to enter data and the public to produce reports, as well as fulfilling the reporting requirements of the campaign finance laws.
The city contracted a private software security firm who found two problems: I forgot to sanitize one block of MySQL inputs (a legitimate problem) and I had left a unused piece of code in the app. that had a couple of errors (legitimate but irrelevant). I was pleased with the review.
ArielMIS, Inc.
ArielMIS is a frequent collaborator. The adage "At the home of the cobbler the children go barefoot" almost proved true here, this took a long time to launch. We migrated the site to Joomla! (creating a custom template) from FarCry and in a scenario that I would later repeat on my own site, this one, it took a very long time to get the content written. The reason is simple -- after working all day (and often into the night) building web sites for other people, it's very hard to get enthusiastic about working on your own.
But eventually it got done. This site marks our first use of a slideshow plugin for Joomla called Frontpage Slideshow, which we have now used on many sites because of it's versatility.
Superior Chamber of Commerce
http://www.superiorchamber.com/
Built using Joomla! with a custom template. The design was a challenge to mark up and a requirement for integrating a legacy member database further complicated things but the project went well, largely because of an attentive, decisive client.
After the site was launched, we retro-fitted a third-party application written specifically for chambers of commerce which greatly improved the site content but was at times difficult to integrate with existing, and well-liked, features.
The home page has a rotating slide feature highlighting key sponsors of the organization which is only noteworthy because we were careful to ensure that the first slide appearing on the page was randomly selected so as not to favor any one. That' a rare level of fair-play.
VMG Industries
This was a perfect candidate for building a dynamic website using Wordpress. Although most often used for it's intended purpose of a blog platform it is also an excellant platform for a small blogless site.
Because of it's simple and intuitive user interface, people without great technical skills can start editing their content with a very few minutes of familiarity, and it has enough power (and plugins) to allow grow. I generally figure a dozen pages is enough to warrant the added complexity of an enterprise-level CMS, Joomla! is generally my choice, but smaller than that and Wordpress is the best candidate.
This site has a custom template, of course, and a nifty "how it works" slideshow implemented using jQuery.
Boulder Mountain Lodge
http://www.bouldermountainlodge.com
This was a pretty straightforward Joomla installation, with a custom template. The size of the site was borderline - we probably would have built it using Wordpress because of the simpler user interface, but we needed to integrate a third-party reservation system which was more easily done using Joomla.
The slide show on the home page shows the lodge off well, too bad I can't take any credit for it.
Coleman Institute for Cognitive Disabilities
http://www.colemaninstitute.org
The Coleman Institute for Cognitive Disabilities is a privately-funded institute at the University of Colorado in Boulder. The current site is a massive revision of a site I originally did for them several years ago, and features conference proceedings (including embedded videos) and a custom bibliographic data base for researchers and care-providers.
The institute insisted that their new site be certified by an independant agency to meet the highest standards of the World Wide Web Consortium's Web Accessibility Initiative. (The standards are WCAG 2.0, for those interested.) I'm proud to say the site was issued that certification by the Adaptive Technology Resource Center of the University of Totonto in January 2009.
I did the entire site (minus content, of course) including HTML and CSS, a custom PHP templating system and a custom PHP database application, including content revisions to meet accessibility standards.
Reb Zalman Legacy Project
Supporters and students of Rabbi Zalman wanted to archive the entire (large) body of his written work and make it available online. The project team extended the FarCry content management system to add an article archive and created a search utility for the archive. We then extended the cms again to create a separate site for a sister organization which could be maintained from the same administration panel.
My part was to design the information structure, write the HTML and CSS templates and do the ColdFusion coding to extend the core CMS platform.
These are wonderful people to work with, if you ever get the chance.
Boulder Arts Resource
Another project that extended the FarCry CMS platform, this time to add a newsletter feature that replaced a printed version. This essentaily duplicated the functionality of an existing site, including a custom calendering application written in ColdFusion, and added a couple of new features.
Wrapping that legacy application in the CMS with the same look and feel turned out to be difficult. Besided the HTML and CSS templates, I did an enormous amount of ColdFusion coding.
It's probably useful, though embarassing, for you to know that this project didn't go very well. Not all of them do, for lots of reasons.
Safehouse Progressive Alliance for Non-violence
A group of us developed a FarCry website around a design that the client brought in. Although attractive, the design wasn't really finished and didn't accomodate all of the necessary features, so Daryl made quite a few changes. My part was developing the HTML and CSS mark-up and building the ColdFusion templates for the CMS.
