By stanbroughl on

Hi Drupal community,

We recently launched a drupal based project - inTERRAgate - and thought we'd drop you a line and let you know - it has the potential to get quite big so could provide some nice publicity for drupal. Site suggestions, critisms, praise are all welcome!

The website is freely accessible at http://www.interragate.info, and provides a framework for uploading natural hazard and risk data at a national level, together with in-country contact details for disaster first-responders. InTERRAgate was launched in March 2007, with introductory information on natural hazard threats in ten of the world’s most vulnerable nations (Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Cameroon, Chile, El Salvador, Indonesia, Iran, Jamaica, Mexico and the Philippines). Like the online encyclopaedia, Wikipedia, inTERRAgate is designed to be ‘owned’ by data suppliers and users, who are able to upload information and influence content. Its ultimate success will, therefore, depend upon registered data suppliers from around the world uploading textual and graphical information to supplement initial data and to expand the country portfolio.

The site aims to assist disaster management NGO’s, humanitarian agencies and search and rescue teams responding to natural disasters. Also, the project seeks to draw attention to potential future threats for every nation to help improve hazard preparedness and foster appropriate mitigation and management measures.

Basic in-country contact information, targeted at disaster first responders and other appropriate national and international NGOs, is available for some of the aforementioned ten countries, and will be supplemented by inTERRAgate editorial staff in the next few months.

At the moment we have a basic framework and are looking for hear from users what they would like to see made available so we can put something together that will be truly useful to the community.

If you would like to know anything else about the project please feel free to contact me at any of the details below.

Best wishes,

Lucy

Lucy Stanbrough

Benfield UCL Hazard Research Centre
Department of Earth Sciences
Gower Street
UCL
London
WC1E 6BT

T: +44 (07834 860497)
E: l.stanbrough@ucl.ac.uk
W: www.benfieldhrc.org
www.interragate.info

⋅ Categories: Drupal 4.7.x

Comments

mohamedn’s picture

mohamedn commented

Hi,

Nice site! How did you go about building the frontpage?

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Qatar - A Community Site

stanbroughl’s picture

stanbroughl commented

i built it using the panels module with a custom block at the top and then a three column layout beneath that - i'm still not happy with the design but i'm in the middle of my finals at the moment so will get back to it after i finish those.

thanks for the feedback!

Lucy

stanbroughl’s picture

stanbroughl commented

and the frontpage module!

anthonylicari’s picture

anthonylicari commented

IMO, you should edit the css of the events calendar so it flows with the colors you have going.

The Culture Lounge

stanbroughl’s picture

stanbroughl commented

thanks for the suggestion anthony - its on my list of things to do!

newdru’s picture

newdru commented

Couple of questions:

1) Are the events event module event nodes plus cck or are they cck nodes plus date fields?

2) And how did you create the search parameters (select menus) that filter the event table results below on this page? views?

http://www.interragate.info/notable-past-events/table

3) On your news and events pages you have a block called similar entries and related events. how do you create those *related* blocks and embed them in the page? is that done automatically or do you have to manually type those in?

http://www.interragate.info/news/2007/04/12/7545
http://www.interragate.info/notable-past-event/5161

4) how did you do the countries gmap:

http://www.interragate.info/country

I imagine that's gmpa module and views?

5) Links: is this cck or some other link module?

http://www.interragate.info/links?sort=desc&order=Title%3A

thanks

stanbroughl’s picture

stanbroughl commented

Hi newdru,

thanks for the questions

1) for npe's the content type is cck with cck date fields to reference the start and end dates. I tried the event fields but they didn't work the way i wanted with the timeline

2) The page is a view and the search parameters at the top are exposed views filters. This will look pretty when i finish my finals and get the time to have another kick at this section

3) The similar entries blocks on the news pages are created automatically using the Similar module (http://drupal.org/project/similar). You can set it to find X number of entries with similar titles and content, and where this should show just titles or titles and teasers. There is a more configurable version out there somewhere but i like the simplicity of this for the moment. There is also a good module out there that allows you to manually set related pages and links that's worth looking into.

4) The countries page is a view with the gmap put in the header section. It's made using a gmap macro where i have manually added the markers, info windows and links to the pages. This was actually very quick to make and as it only has to be done once wasn't a problem. I know they are making developments for marker selection in the 5.x version for gmap for marker selection so this could eventually be done with a view.

5) Links are submitted with the links module (just the basic module sections enabled) and then the page is generated with a view for title, terms, description, etc with sorts turned on for each of the columns

Hope this helps - let me know if you have any other questions

Lucy

newdru’s picture

newdru commented

3) Regarding similar entries on the *EVENT* link:

http://www.interragate.info/notable-past-event/5161

That event similar entries block seems to be inserted INTO the content area versus the sidebar like it is on the news page. How did you theme the block into the content area versus the sidebar - did you theme it into the page template or the cck (node) template? I'm thinking it's actually the cck event tpl? Any insights or code snippets would be great.

4) Can you help a little more with gmap page?

i think you're saying is that you created your maps by going to some macro generator site to generate you basic gmap macro and then inserted that into the header section of the view. It then sounds like you had to also manually include your markers in that same header code (which i imagine you had to manually go to a site to find those coordinates as well). right?

OK.. so now i'm tyring to figure out how this fits in with views and the gmap displays of the individual countries.

I imagine the view is called 'country' per:

http://www.interragate.info/country

And it is set to display a page with type *table* of the listed countries. That makes sense.

Now when i click on a country in the table list of the view, it brings up an individual country page with it's own gmap. Initially i *thought* this was the original country view with an argument per:

http://www.interragate.info/country/afganistan (afgahnistan being the views arg)

But i don't think it is right? Instead it's a separate content type you created for each country (and pathaliased so it would fall under path 'country'). You then created the gmap content directly in the body like you did for the header for country view, yes? or possibly you generated the macro dynamically?

6) I just went to apply for a google api key but i don't have a registered domain name yet (e.g. i'm developing locally on my localhost). Note, when i develop locally, i am actually using a local host/domain name (e.g. www.example.com) that routes to localhost server at 127.0.0.1. Do you know if google api will work with that? If not how do people get around trying out google api without actually having a domain? I can't find an answer on their site. Note even if i had a registered domain with a parked page and i was developing the actual site offline, would google still serve my gmap pages locally?

7) Do you know if gmap is smart enough to post a marker based solely on city and state? In otherwords, say you want to create a map of logged in users based on their location information in a profile but the profile only has city state (no zip or other pertinent info).. just curious

8) Do you know if it's possible to make the gmap NONdraggable and NONresizable with a macro option/parm?

9) The countries select menu. I imagine you hard coded that in a block correct. Or did you pull it out of the db and create it on the fly with php code?

thanks so much for your help

nisguy’s picture

nisguy commented

From my first impression it seems user-friendly. I could tell within a few seconds that the site was about 'hazard' or disaster awareness. I even felt compelled to click on Hazards to see what you had.

One comment. There are too many statistics showing for each node. For example on http://www.interragate.info/hazards all of this is showing:

Home
Hazards
Submitted by administrator on Thu, 01/02/2007 - 22:08. 
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Where I only think a Title is necessary.

Good Luck!