Natropolis.net – Eco-City Social Network

Project description

Note: launching soon at www.natropolis.net

Natropolis is an online eco-city guide, social network, and creative collective—utilizing video, photography, and audio interviews to document how cities and neighborhoods are transforming into more livable places, and to inform and inspire individuals seeking a healthier, more eco-conscious lifestyle.

One of Natropolis’ main efforts is to show existing examples of how sustainability can enrich one's life. There are numerous businesses, individuals, institutions, and organizations in the Chicago-area that are already making this incredible shift. Natropolis aims to be the network of idea-and- knowledge-exchange, community discussions and social activities connected to sustainability and green business of Chicago area.

Therefore, development of a website that should cover this multitude of features in an easy-to-use but visually appealing and modern way was an interesting challenge. From the very start, the goal was to make a site of extraordinary visual and content management quality that matches expensive enterprise class solutions, but also to retain inside the budget frames typical for middle-size project. We have succeeded through numerous iterations to deliver a solution that was not only completely fulfilling the wishes of Natropolis, but also to develop a site that exceeded our own expectations.

MontenaSoft learned through this project not only numerous new Drupal techniques, but also developed internal structures and procedures that would allow us to remain flexible response policy in future enterprise projects.

From numerous features developed for this site, we would like to point to:

• automation of various audio and video streaming workflows to allow simple content administration paired with flexibility in content provider policy
• implementation of self organizing patterns in community collaboration subsystem through extensive use of Organic Groups and advanced JavaScript programming
• Creating and enabling of easily extendable administrator tools that connects blogging, news, community moderation, flexible tagging system etc.

Several Drupal modules that MontenaSoft developed for the project could easily become good candidates for a community release. We would be happy to share our expertise with others, since development of this product would be impossible without numerous achievements of Drupal community.

MontenaSoft is very pleased with the outcome of our cooperation with Natropolis.net and will continue to support further development of Natropolis’ business model and web site.