The UNaLab consortium is comprised of 28 partners from 10 cities across Europe and beyond, including municipalities, research, business and industry. The project aims at using the feedback from the urban living lab demonstration areas to create a widely applicable toolbox consisting of user-friendly handbooks, models and instruments to guide cities across Europe in developing and implementing their own co-creative nature-based solutions. The UNaLab sets out to provide a framework for future upscaling of nature-based solutions in the demonstration cities. They address identified urban climate and water related challenges by co-creating nature-based solutions with local stakeholders and end users, using an innovative systemic decision support tool.
About the project
The main goal of the project was to set up a solid foundation for the CMS based features. This includes re-usable information sections, News and Events content types, calendar, Publications and Blogs. But apart from this, in the backend, the site needed to have a full blown content moderation system, user profile wall, where status updates could be posted with #tags and @mentions, groups feature, an extensive search and finally a detailed contact management system. For reusable sections we came up with a concept called sectional data. We created a set of content types, which had certain set of fields, each content type will then allow selection if certain number of templates. Finally nodes of these content were exposed as blocks, and the block when displayed will pick up the template selected in the node. The blocks were made reusable through the Reusable Blocks module. The end result was a powerful display system giving the client the power to created and design standard pages on the fly. For Content Moderation, as a base we used the awesome workbench moderation module for this. But this was heavily customised through it's APIs and through rules integration. The wall and #tags & @mentions was implemented using the statuses module. This is a really great module and it provided a great base, on top of which we implemented out customisations.
Overall the client was extremely satisfied by the end result, and we strengthened out professional bond once again.
Why Drupal was chosen
Drupal was definitely a choice for a data intensive platform like UNALABS, which was planned to have extensive content inter-relations and intricacies. It also boasted of some pretty extensive functionalities in the backend for which we foresaw Drupal as perfect fit. UNALABS looks like more of an informational website at a quick glance, but provides some complicated functionalities like a full blown invoicing system, an advanced editorial workflow, facebook like wall for group discussion etc. Drupal provided all the necessary modules for developing a site like this plus it provides robust APIs that will allow us to easily do the necessary customisations. The client had already done a series of drupal websites with us, and as such right from the start both us and the client preferred Drupal for this project.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
The content management system was built using lots of standard modules like field collections, field collection ajax and other modules which provide various field types. The reusable blocks were made reusable through multiblock module. The workbench moderation was used to provide base work for the moderation mechanism which was then customised. Statuses module provided the base for the facebook style wall and this was further expanded through custom APIs plus fbsmp and fbsst modules.
