Geophysical Institute Website

02 Jan 2018 - | Author: Laurin

For this project I was working for RCS - Research Computing Systems at the Geophysical Institute. They’re a small team doing IT and Software support for the researchers.

I was hired as a student worker there and assigned to helping create the new GI website and transfer content. I worked on multiple aspects of the site, adding plugins/libraries, testing the UI, and transferring old content to the new pages.

Our goal was to create a site that didn’t get out of date (no contact info, etc that would not be monitored) and was easy for users to create new content, as well as visitors to view that content.

Particularly, I was apart of small seemingly random aspects of the site. For Example, I worked on the Magnetometer page, finding a critical bug and working with a co-worker to get it fixed. I also worked on the People tab, the filtering, layout, photo uniformity, etc. I worked on the Events, Students, and About tabs as well.

The biggest scripting data transfer I accomplished though was the Alaska Science Forum. There were hundreds of articles to be transferred and using Python (Beautiful Soup) I scripted it’s transfer to the new site.

Drupal, a CMS, made the website work fairly easy. Sometimes it was a pain trying to get libraries to cooperate or to find the right ones (maintained, secure), but the interface for setting up the site was often code-less (I did use some CSS every now and then though. And I made a PHP module for the magnetometer).

Overall the website is more maintainable, accessible, and modern than the old site and will likely be used with minor changes for years.

Drupal Web PHP Python