Dumfries & Galloway Environmental Resources Centre
A customised open source CMS with bespoke graphical database search tool
the client
The DGERC is a non-profit organisation dedicated to collating, managing and disseminating information on Dumfries & Galloway's natural environment
the brief
The centre had secured funding for a new interactive site to support Dumfries & Galloway's wildlife recording community and make the DGERC's records readily available to the public. A key feature of the new site would be a searchable wildlife database with a map-based interface. The site also needed to incorporate an events calendar and forum and to be fully updateable by centre staff.
my role
I was responsible for selecting and configuring the best open source CMS for the job, customising it where required, and translating the designer's html templates into a working theme. I also designed and implemented the map-based interface for the centre's species database.
technical details
The site was built using the drupal content management system. The WildSearch database interface is a custom module. It is written in php and makes use of AJAX techniques and the Smarty templating engine.