I designed, developed and continue to improve the Chesapeake Network, an online community website that allows users to share messages, documents, and events. The site is used by over 5,000 people across the country to collaborate on Chesapeake Bay restoration. I built the site using Zurb's Foundation for Sites framework and the site is powered by a custom theme on Wordpress, relying heavily on the Buddypress plugin.
The home screen features an activity feed which shows announcements from all your subscribed groups.
The goal of the site was to allow users to easily post information and for the rest of the site's members to be able to receive this information and easily filter and search through it. Members can elect to receive email notifications of any announcement or a daily digest from each of their groups. A search feature is in progress.
Separate post types allow announcements to be distinguished by posts, questions (forum board), events (calendar), resources (downloadable files) and job postings. Additionally, all announcements can be tagged with the major states in the Chesapeake Bay watershed.
Many features of the site are custom built, such as the method to create a new announcement through a front-end, multistep form (see below) and the email handler that processes incoming emails and adds them as pending announcements via php-cgi. One of the most rewarding parts of this project was learning so many new techniques and tools, like diving deep into Buddypress code, version control with Git, using SASS and grunt to compile my CSS, and more.
A multi-step form guides members through creating an announcement. Members select their message type, enter the content (each message type has specific meta data fields), and finally select which group they'd like to post to as well as which states to tag the post with.
The site's design and layout pulls from popular and familiar websites so that new members can quickly navigate it.
Similar to other popular and familiar social media websites, the Chesapeake Network allows users to have a customizable profile page.
