Drupalcon Boston 2008 - Science news

Popular Science

Laura — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 19:56:25 +0000

In February 2008, Popular Science, the fifth-oldest continually-published monthly magazine, relaunched its online presence with an enterprise-level website developed by pingVision, powered by Drupal.

Founded in 1872, Popular Science, the “What’s New, What’s Next magazine,” has witnessed, reported on, and evaluated countless scientific and technological developments, from the dawn of electricity to the latest innovations of today’s information age — advances that have shaped the way we live, work, play, travel, communicate, understand and interact with the world.

Prior to its relaunch, the Popular Science website used several disparate systems to deliver content. One of the goals for the new site was to provide a unified user interface while increasing usability and functionality. pingVision was able to use Drupal to meet Popular Science’s usability and functional requirements, while converting and importing several years’ worth of content from a Vignette 7 CMS and TypePad blogs.

pingVision also integrated several third-party services, including a fantasy stock trading system, video conversion and hosting services, and advertising. In addition to taking advantage of various contributed modules, pingVision created a number of custom modules, including the Drupal Markup Engine for content placement within nodes and Node Carousel for displaying content. The site was deployed on multiple servers, with additional caching handled by using Memcache.

(Case study coming soon. We will update with a link when that happens.)

SolveClimate.com

Gregory Heller — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 01:47:38 +0000

SolveClimate.com is news and information site focusing on climate change related news. Blog entries are added to the site and related to other content along 3 axis: politicians and candidates, constituency groups and major solutions to climate change. The goal of the site is to show that there is common cause amongst disparate groups of Americans for progress on major climate change solutions.

To achieve the site’s mission, a CivicActions team consisting of project manager, information architect, lead engineer, theme engineer and application specialist worked with the client and a third party designer using Drupal and contributed modules to develop a visually appealing and well functioning site.

The site makes significant use of CCK, Views and Panels, as well as Node Auto Term and other taxonomy based features to pull together content consisting of blog entries, profiles, nodes describing solutions as well as candidates policy positions on those solutions and a glossary around the three axis mentioned above. Users can sign-up for the site and subscribe to email updates based on categories (via the subscriptions module, or simply subscribe to RSS feeds.

We are also using a variety of techniques maintain site responsiveness during periods of high volume as a result of social bookmarking sites like Digg.

HarvardScience news site

modulist — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 01:32:33 +0000

HarvardScience is a news site covering all of the scientific achievements and discoveries for all matters related to science at the various schools, departments, institutes, and hospitals of Harvard University.

The site combines news articles on hundreds of topics with photography, rich media, and video. The site also contains a directory of science at Harvard which provides background information on the thousands of researchers and organizations behind the stories.

HarvardScience is geared to the interested scientist as much as the general public and members of the media. The site’s rich media clips and photography provide content of general interest, while the links to related content are a gold mine of information for someone conducting research in the field.

Built on a small budget to handle a limited public relations role, the site’s rapid success has turned it into an important news channel for the innovation and research happening at Harvard. The actual volume of news stories in the site has turned out to be several multiples of what was originally expected, requiring a Page 2 with a spillover of the news stories on the home page.

HarvardScience is a publication of the Harvard Office of News and Public Affairs. It was developed jointly with studio:module, and Maureen Lyons provided her programming expertise for developing the site in Drupal.

Drupal Developer
Maureen Lyons

The site was design by studio:module of Miami, FL
Claudio Luis Vera, creative director
Alisha Haydn Vera, designer
Richard Roth, developer