The Federal Education Budget Project

TKS — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 03:17:00 +0000

The Federal Education Budget Project details the demographics, finances and test scores of all 14,000+ school districts in the United States. It was built for the Education Policy Program at the New America Foundation — a nonpartisan think tank based in Washington DC.

This site was built in-house, with very little in the way of real custom development. It makes heavy use of Views, CCK, and some thoroughly modified .tpl.php files for the District and State pages. Users get top-line data presented graphically, and can compare any district to others (either in-state or nation-wide) using the data points they choose.

I submit it here as an example of how much Drupal can deliver even when the “developer” lacks all but the most basic of coding skills. There are undoubtedly more elegant and efficient ways to tackle some aspects of the site — and we continue to work on those — but it’s become a very robust resource already. And aside from the arguments used in the district-comparison Views, and some truly simply PHP in the templates, it’s all done with Drupal’s “out of the box” functionality.

DATA - Debt Aids Trade Africa

DaveNotik — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 18:26:24 +0000

Perhaps one of the most beautiful sites built on Drupal, DATA.org is fully integrated with Drupal. We have not announced this site anywhere else, so the fact that this is on Drupal is new to the community.

The flash piece on the front page reads from an XML file that is spit out by a “Flash banner item” CCK type that allows for uploading the image, specifying the linkto URL, the actual text on the banner, and the order. The sliding blocks are a special themed block region and the JS it depends on is dynamic based on the number of blocks assigned to that region.

On the sub pages, the left hand navigation is automatically created based on choosing the parent menu item and assigning a weight on the Page type itself. The breadcrumbs are themed, and a field on the Page type allows for overriding the title used in the breadcrumb.

TinyMCE is cleanly integrated, utilizes the same styles and is set to the same fixed width of the site itself. Images can be uploaded via img_assist, and Flash can be embedded via the TinyMCE button/plug-in. The styles drop down shows relevant styles for the publisher to choose.

The “Did You Know” item is controlled with its own content type, upload an image and choose the order and the JS gets built. Print preview is cleanly themed, as are Search Results.

That’s the uber-quick case study. You may view some basic screenshots (plus some random screens of our Google Apps setup for another client) in the PDF referenced here.

Drupalcon Boston 2008 - data

The Federal Education Budget Project

DATA - Debt Aids Trade Africa