This is the community website of the Technical Community on Haptics of IEEE. This website manages the news and the activities of this community that covers around 500 scientists and researchers in the domain of Haptics

Why Drupal was chosen: 

Number of plugins available, community size and in particular possibility of customizing properties of users

Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome): 

The objective of the project was to move the previous static website to a content management system that allowed to support the management of several types of information of the research activities. In particular listings of conferences, awards, publications and projects. A key requirement was the possibility to enter members of the TCH and associate them with custom profile information that allow to identify researchers in the domain. Additional requirements were the integration with an existing mailing list and the support for the election process.

The website has been completed keeping the exact graphical layout of the previous version. The other challenge was the transition of the existing MySQL database to Drupal entities, in particular the ones of the subjects. This has been not trivial due to some limits in importing and the quality of the Profile2 module.

Technical specifications

Key modules/theme/distribution used: 
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen: 

The selection of modules has been long and detailed. A blog post on this topic has been performed: http://teslacore.blogspot.com/2012/02/drupal-one-module-after-another.html

The template adopted was Zen, while the key module for member management was Profile2

Project team: 

One single developer (Emanuele Ruffaldi http://drupal.org/user/265963), not performing this as its main job. The aim was to avoid the writing of PHP code, mainly due to maintainability.

Sectors: 
Technology