my (fall, winter) spring project

My big project of the spring went public today. It's called the California Inclusionary Housing Policy Database, and we introduced it like this:

The California Coalition for Rural Housing (CCRH) is pleased to launch a free searchable database of more than 130 California Inclusionary Housing (IH) programs, the first of its kind in the U.S.

The California Inclusionary Housing Policy Database contains information on the key characteristics of California IH programs in existence in 2006. At that time there were an estimated 170 programs, of which CCRH was able to retrieve electronic and hard copy versions of approximately 80%.

...

The database provides summaries of characteristics for each policy. Users may search for these summaries by jurisdiction name or by more than 30 other variables. ... In addition, each summary provides a link to the jurisdiction's full policy.

This project has been in progress since the beginning of my service last September. In the fall, I worked closely with two other CCRH staff members to design the database; by the spring, I was designing and implementing the search feature and the policy layouts. My coworker Brandi analyzed the policies and input the data. In the past few weeks I've collaborated with CCRH's ED on the final interface and text; I've recieved a ton of invaluable input from both him and my supervisor. I've also communicated with other members of the nonprofit housing community as buzz built around this project, and during a two week beta test period. This project was interesting and challenging to work on, and has proved rewarding both in what I've learned and in the resource I've helped my organization provide to the community.

And for the techies: I built the CCRH website with Drupal 4.7. The inclusionary housing policies are a CCK content type, because it allowed us to get the design and data entry set up quickly. I used the ConTemplate module to the template for IH policy CCK type from within Drupal. The search feature is a custom module I wrote which can provide a search feature for any CCK content type. I hope to release this module after I clean up the code, flesh out some features, and port it to the latest Drupal version.