Dan Polant :: Web Interaction Designer

Case Study

Switchback CMS offers two main products: custom Drupal installations and service-based Drupal-Civicrm integrations. As lead developer, I was responsible for both supporting existing accounts, implementing systems for new clients, and training new developers. The Switchback team relies and thrives on effective communication between project managers, designers and developers, and we deliver powerful, dependable Drupal applications on an efficient timeline.

The list below is comprised of the projects for which I did heavy feature development or ground-up implementations. I filled the support role for nearly all of the projects listed in Switchback’s portfolio.

Midwest Eye-Bank

Midwest Eye-Bank (MEB) needed a way of organizing their internal documents – a replacement for a simple ftp server that had been used previously. Drupal offered the opportunity to allow for advanced searches and metadata, more comprehensive group management and a better overall user experience.

We used Drupal 7 for MEB. We contributed testing notes and bug-fixing patches for a number of Drupal core/Organic groups issues during development. File security was an important issue, so we wrote some custom code to handle securing file downloads from private groups.

Wunderground Module

Weather Underground offers a comprehensive weather reporting web service that draws from thousands of personal weather stations around the country (you can think of them as “open-source” weather). Their Drupal module was in need of an upgrade. We created several new blocks that let users better leverage the power and detail of the Weather Underground data.

Under-the-hood improvements included multiblock support and locations integration. We aimed to provide the most comprehensive weather information module for Drupal. These enhancements are currently found in the dev version of the Weather Underground module, pending the maintainer’s merge into the main branch.

Bgreen Today

Bgreentoday.com sells sustainable building and restaurant materials. Their site is an attribute-heavy ubercart implementation, the main catalog being views embedded on template-overridden taxonomy pages.

This project involved fairly complex data migration of products with attributes and overlapping taxonomy terms. Special url handling was added so that products would automatically generate multiple aliases if they appeared in more than one root taxonomy section.

Traverse City Chamber of Commerce

Switchback’s Civicrm-Drupal package powers tcchamber.org. We added enhancements to the membership process, administrative interface, search functionality, event discounts and mass email. Many of these features were contributed back to the Civicrm project.