Remedi - regenerative medicine institute at NUI, Galway

Remedi is the regenerative medicine institute at NUI, Galway. The have just launched their new website, running Drupal 5 at www.remedi.ie.

Background

Remedi's old site had been developed a few years ago, and it was struggling to cope with the demands placed on it by new members to the Remedi team, who wanted more control and flexibility. The team at Proactive met with Derek Mitchell where we outlined our process and explained what we could do for Remedi with a new website.

Derek also explained that this is seen as phase one of the website development project, and that future extensibility would be a key part of the requirements.

Site Architecture

We spent a good time of time working out the goals for the new project, and defined the key audiences as

• researchers within the regenerative medicine field
• students
• potential and current partners
• current remedi staff
• the general public

In particular, Remedi wanted to highlight the top researchers in the field who worked there.

From there, Remedi gathered the content needed to put the site together. This is a key point in our process at Proactive - getting content up front - as it shapes the direction of the site. Here, for example, we identified that staff profiles had to cater for staff with very different levels of experience, and yet retain a consistent structure.

From this wireframes of key sections and pages were drawn up and presented. Once we were happy with those, a creative design, reflecting Remedi's goals was developed.

Module selection and theme development.

And then it was time to build out the site in Drupal.

The two main contributed modules were of course, CCK and Views. With the CCK addon modules Imagefield and Filefield, the basis for gathering the bulk of the content was complete.

Other interesting features are integration with Delicious, where each research area can tag interesting items in Delicious which are then featured in the relevant section of the site. One of the long term goals is increased use of social media, so this a first step in that direction.

To add some current content from within the field, the adminsitrators can add selected RSS feeds, using the Feedapi and Feedmapper, and again these get placed directly into the relevant sections.

Layout and Themeing

The site is, as usual at Proactive, built using a custom theme, though based on the excellent Zen theme. Many of the visual clues beside elements such as staff names in a list, are built using taxonomy terms.

Hosting

The site is hosted on the NUI Galway web cluster, and as I have deployed a few sites on the cluster at this stage, I'm aware of most of the peculiarities. The one that hit me hardest was the inability to use the Drupal search module. This requires the ability to create temporary tables. Unfortunaltely, the university web cluster uses a mysql cluster running NDB cluster, which doesn't support temporary tables. To get around this, we built a simple google custom search engine.

Summary

The best projects are those where the client has a real interest in buildiing a top website, and Remedi weren't found wanting here. They wanted a fresh dynamic website, and I'm satisfied we've delivered that.