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The Open Movement

The Openº Movement champions the places where people come together to make new ideas happen.

They approached me with the requirement to take their Google Sheets based database and create a dynamic, web based CMS from them which was deeply searchable and presented results both using traditional listings and interactive Google maps.

I created all front end UI code and deployed the site in Drupal.

Pete was great to work with, always friendly and approachable even at weird times of the day! He imported our content over from a legacy database and set us up with a really powerful Drupal system.

We had lots of detailed ‘front end’ requests about functionality and design and Pete was able to handle them all, alongside some pretty complicated ‘back end’ stuff too.

Ted Maxwell, Openº

Complex filtering, fast search

In the original dataset projects had already been tagged heavily by type, function and so on and all these references were preserved in the data import as Drupal taxonomies then used to build a deeply searchable system - whether used to generate traditional listings or output GeoJSON data to display using maps.

In addition I also setup Apache SOLR indexing using Acquia search facilities to enable super fast, full keyword searching of the database.

All searching was done using AJAX to speed load times.

Interactive mapping

I generated bespoke styled maps using the MapBox service and then integrated the site with the MapBox api, building a custom module for the purpose, so as to display fully searchable, filtered results on the map. Again all results were gathered using AJAX to avoid reloading the map and preserve location when zooming / navigating the map. Results were clustered and custom markers were applied to get the right look and feel.

Interactive

The site makes extensive use of jQuery, HTML5 and CSS3 on the front end, as well as pulling in data and content via AJAX to produce a highly interactive, modern interface. The site was built from the ground up using Twitter Bootstrap and is fully responsive. In future the aim is to also generate device specific content by splitting traffic.
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