Using Drupal to Engage in the Dialogue Around the Economic Recovery

Drupal is at heart a content publishing platform. A way to share information as quickly and as accessibly as possible. In the U.S. right now there is no more important dialogue then that surrounding the economic recovery. It affects everyone. This is why Zivtech is proud to announce the launch of the Keystone Research Center's flagship site: http://keystoneresearch.org

As a research and policy development institute, the Keystone Research Center (KRC) conducts original research, produces reports, and promotes public dialog that addresses important economic and civic problems, and proposes new policies to help resolve those problems.

The KRC's site launch coincides with the release of their annual report The State of Working PA 2009 which found that the federal stimulus has worked to halt the economic free fall of six months ago. The bad news is that 'inflation-adjusted wages for middle-class workers have declined over the past year,' while 'the the incomes of the wealthiest Pennsylvanians have surged to new highs.' 192,000 Pennsylvanians have lost their jobs since December 2007, though the losses have decreased from 31,000 a month between February and April to 9,200 in the last three months.

The KRC recommends that 'policymakers charting a course out of the ―Great Recession: borrow two principles of the New Deal: continue stimulating the economy and enact structural reforms to rebuild the middle class. '

For the KRC site, Zivtech added a number of features to help the KRC publish more quickly and to make their content more accessible. We worked with KRC staff to re-architect the site and helped build and theme a slick new design. We took advantage of Featured Content Slider and Quick Tabs to offer more content with more user-friendly choices on the home page. We created an Issue content type that takes advantage of CCK's new multi-group fieldset (still in development) which allows KRC staff to add blocks with rich content on their Issues without the complicated steps involved with creating and assigning new blocks.

The KRC has a decade's worth of publications, reports, news briefs and other content as well as their current reports. In order to make these publications as accessible we created a number of content types and taxonomies and made them sortable and searchable with Apache SOLR.

Apache SOLR works with CCK and Taxonomy fields to allow users to click through searches by category as well as sort searches by date, relevancy, and other info