Community Pathways

A huge amount of research went into this site which covers nearly 40 different community approaches to action on climate change. It also cross-references each approach with related resources, case studies, literature and cross-cutting issues. The idea of the site is to allow community groups to find approaches that are suited to their circumstances.

The key features I implemented were:

• A powerful faceted search system to match the various scoring systems and criteria to the complex data in the site, thus helping groups find ideal approaches for them.
• Writing a custom module to simplifies and improves upon the raw Search Lucene faceted search system to allow users to be guided though questions to find approaches. It also allows easy editing of very complicated searches. I chose Apache Search Lucene instead of Apache Solr because of its power on lower-spec web hosts coupled with the the fact it doesn't need Java servlets, and because it matched our needs perfectly.
• Creating the content types, internal references and views to show related data, then importing a HUGE Excel spreadsheet into Drupal.
• Writing a custom content filter to auto-replace references, like "A00123", into full links to other site content.

More soon...