This was actually an older project that I worked on when I was at Red Red Design. It was a HUGELY ambitious project, and as we worked on it, we found that it gave us a keen insight into some of the requirements of a content management system that you can’t learn from around the web. The idea behind the site was to provide a clearinghouse of not only information for upcoming graduates to find jobs, but potential employees to get a list of upcoming graduates in their department of interest.
It also served as a place for prospective students to learn more information about their educational pursuits, including the closest locations to take required courses.
The site provides an innovative system that allows users to quickly drill through courses of study and examine the requirements of each. This is followed by the generation of a map that pinpoints the location of each class requirement.
Technologies Used:
- Ruby on Rails – Of course this was a great candidate for rails. The backend required some (but not a ton) of ajax magic. The URLs were well defined, and most of the actions of the site consisted of manipulating scads of interrelated data. We used rails on this one so that we could quickly take advantage of the advanced scaffolding abilities of rails.
- RedCloth – Since there was a great deal of text to lay out, and on one REALLY uses html (do they?) to layout static text, we used textile to make text layout more sane.
- Git – Once again, a ton of people were going to be editing the code and assets. One day, I might write an article on why I have chosen git over the other SCM’s out there. I have used them all (except mercurial) and found that git makes source code management much more clean.
- Ajax(programming) – There is a great deal of data moving through the pipe, but not much need for UI updates on this site. This made it a great candidate for ajaxifying many of the UI elements. You really have to fiddle with the site to get a feel for what is going on.
- Google Maps API – There are lots of nifty tricks going on in this one. We found a list of lat/long points that defined the counties, so there is a county overlay on the map. There are custom markers. Once again, if you poke around on the file, there are surprises everywhere.
