By adijeff on

Hi, I'm a newbie to Drupal, and this is my first post! My first Drupal site is an intranet-type site for our company. The site gathers data about "freelancers" for staff to search on. Freelancers can log in and complete a number of forms to complete their profile. Staff use freelancers to help deliver work, but need to pick the best person for the job based on a number of criteria. I've used a number of modules to get this to work ie CCK and Views, Node Profile, Automatic Node Title, Pageroute, and Faceted Search.

On each page the freelancer give themselves a grade (1 - 5) for expertise, skills, knowledge of certain tools, experience in different areas etc. I've used CCK to create eg an "expertise" content type which lists things like coaching, facilitation, mentoring etc etc. and a drop-down box for each one.

I've used Views to be able to list and sort this data as tables, and faceted search to display all data on one screen and give the ability to drill down one area say "all people with a 1 for mentoring". This is not ideal because I can't do a search for say, "all people who score highly for mentoring, but also have good 'teamworking' skills". So this is one area I'd like advice on.

There is one area that I need to create and I don't know how to do it. I want freelancers to be able to list organisations they have worked in. Some freelancers may have worked in the same organisation, so I would want that link to show up. How would I go about this so that it is searchable, sortable, and done in a way to avoid duplication of organisations.

Thanks for any advice.

Adi

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

krisvannest’s picture

krisvannest commented

There is one area that I need to create and I don't know how to do it. I want freelancers to be able to list organisations they have worked in. Some freelancers may have worked in the same organisation, so I would want that link to show up. How would I go about this so that it is searchable, sortable, and done in a way to avoid duplication of organisations.

Interesting question... not sure, but here are some ideas.

Freetagging w/ Autocomplete
You could make a freetagging vocab that autocompleted (that's an option you'll see when creating the vocab), but then as you pointed out people may enter in different names for the same company, making it look like they worked at different places when they actually didn't.

Identify Unique Identifiers
You might try analyzing a ton of companies to see what types of identification is precise and unique. For instance-- and I have no idea if this is true-- perhaps all companies have some kind of Better Business Bureau ID#, or a ISO # or something that you could instruct freelances to use to identify the companies. Or if not that, perhaps go the Facebook route and use email/web addresses, such as having freelances enter in just the domain names (e.g., "xyzcompany.com") to identify which companies they work for with the idea that each company, by virtue of the web, can only have one unique domain. If neither of these, then keep analyzing the field to determine if there's some other unique identifier.

Pre-Validate
I don't know how big youplan on making your site, but if it's only intended as a small private site then you might require freelances to first submit company names so you can human-filter them... basically make sure each is unique... IMO this is a last resort because of the obvious workload implications if/when you try to scale.

Hopefully other members can chip in here because it's a good, macro-oriented question that is best solved in your design phase as you're trying to do now.

Good luck!

adijeff’s picture

adijeff commented

Thanks for the great suggestions Krisvannest. I like the freetagging suggestion, because it is simple and having had a play with it - seems to work for my needs except for duplications, but I've found a module called term merge to edit and merge terms in the list periodically.

Any suggestions on this bit anyone...

I've used Views to be able to list and sort this data as tables, and faceted search to display all data on one screen and give the ability to drill down one area say "all people with a 1 for mentoring". This is not ideal because I can't do a search for say, "all people who score highly for mentoring, but also have good 'teamworking' skills". So this is one area I'd like advice on.

Thanks

krisvannest’s picture

krisvannest commented

I forget if the author is still working on this, but check out my post referencing this very cool "Exhibit" technology over at http://drupal.org/node/107493 -- if you look at the Presidents example, it gives a very nice way to narrow down searches. I think I remember the author mentioned they might be doing some Drupal 6 mod for it, but check their development page to see the latest (I havent' followed it for a bit).

Update: BTW, when you visit the presidents example (see comment #1 in link above), click on "TABLE" at the top then use the boxes on the right to start filtering. It will progressively limit your choices to only those that match previous selections, effectively and IMO nicely narrowing things down.

adijeff’s picture

adijeff commented

Thanks for your comments Kris. Exhibit does look very interesting. Unfortunately, I'm using Drupal 5.7 and the mod is for 6. Also, I'm not a coder, so the phrase

you will not be able to utilize this module unless you understand how to build exhibits in XHTML

and their getting started page scares me!