Anatomy of a Professional Community Portal

Our mission on this project was to create a portal for a professional community. The Portal aimed to support the usual range of community functionality such as blogging, forums and aggregating news feeds, host curated, searchable libraries of documents – from Standard Operating Procedures to Equipment Manuals and browsable and searchable directories of key information such as suppliers of equipment or professional programs. In addition, it needed to provide custom, secure workspaces where groups of users could collaborate on activities such as ISO accreditation and quality assurance. These workspaces needed to assist the group manage the process, monitor events and store relevant document and submissions in one easy-to-find place. The Portal also had to support an ecommerce area where merchants could sell equipment, training courses and quality assurance/proficiency testing programs.

Community Portal Functionality

Since there was a very limited amount of time in which to produce a demonstrable system and an even more limited budget for developing it, we opted to use Drupal as the underlying platform. Some of the pros and cons of this decision, and a comparison with SharePoint, were discussed in the previous blog. The combination of Drupal core, Views and Ubercart enabled us to roll out the ecommerce area and basic community features such as blogs, forums, job center, news aggregation rapidly and with relatively little direct coding.

An Example of a Browsable, Searchable Directory

Drupal’s taxonomy infrastructure, together with Views and Drupal’s core content management and search capabilities, made it very straightforward to roll out a number of different libraries and directories that were both easy to set up and easy for content managers to add to and edit. For situations in which content can be contributed by more than a small group of content managers/writers, Drupal supports workflow management although – like many Drupal functions – it does require a little more work to set up than SharePoint 2010’s more plug-and-play approach.

For the workspaces we created permission controlled secure areas that featured a mix of calendars and events, lists e.g. task lists, subscription lists, member lists – and content libraries e.g. standard guides, test submissions and test results. Each workspace was set up to support multiple projects within the overall activity type.

An Example of a Secure, Custom Workspace

The area we found least satisfactory were Drupal’s out-of-the-box submission forms for anything other than standard content such as documents and blogs. It did not provide a satisfactory interface for more complex data submission and we are currently testing various form modules and functional extensions to rectify this.

All in all, we found Drupal a very powerful and effective platform for building a professional community portal. As in any IT project, planning and design is an essential ingredient in long term growth and maintainability. In particular, we would recommend careful consideration of the information architecture in advance of any development. Drupal is underpinned by a relational database and the same considerations of redundancy, normalization and entity-relationships that hold in conventional system design, hold for Drupal development and design too. Consideration needs to be given to the relationships between the objects that Drupal nodes represent and data dictionaries set up to define each field. Doing this, you can leverage the power of Views to create a functionally rich, maintainable portal.