The Alberta Ingenuity Fund: Drupalfied!

From the home page of the Alberta Ingenuity Fund website:logo_0

The Alberta Ingenuity Fund supports science and engineering research of the highest caliber, to create a prosperous future for the province. It draws funding from a $1 billion endowment established and managed by the Government of Alberta to build the capacity for innovation, especially in areas with long lasting social and economic impact.

Alberta Ingenuity website screenshotThis is an organization requiring cutting edge communications technologies to spread their message, and avail information about the latest research grants, student scholarships and other funding programs available in the province of Alberta. I was able to take everything about their previous website and "drupalfy" it. Using the open source website framework technology "Drupal" I was able to provide everything they had in their old website, plus a whole lot more. Running on their own in-house virtual servers, Scott eSolutions was tasked with installing and configuring the virtual Centos (5.2) OS linux server. Video transcoding capabilities built in. Publishing videos has never been easier, internal administrators can now upload videos of up to 100MB through their web browser and have them automatically transcoded into an efficient window size easy for streaming, with a preview, and a thumbnail image.

Tasks like organizing, previewing, tracking, and adding content became a lot easier for the administrators of this website. The ability to publish and un-publish content, preview content, and categorize content had previously been non-existent or limited. Today, they're using tried and tested PHP code that began as the Drupal framework, but  was customized for their needs.

This site was launched September 16th, 2008 using Drupal v5.10 and contributed modules. Some of these modules include: CCK, Views 1, Flashvideo, Lightbox2, FCKeditor, Imagecache, Taxonomy Breadcrumb, XML Sitemap, and the Zen theme. Scott eSolutions did not provide the site design or graphical elements and was hired to improve the content management while keeping everything the same for the users and the public.

Work continues as Scott eSolutions continues to support Alberta Ingenuity Fund with help and technical support, as well as develop a new home page and make other major changes to the website structure, bringing it inline with today's Web standards.