WhereItsAtNYC.org

Where It's At NYC is another great example of a mostly "out-of-the box" drupal implementation. The defining characteristic of the site's implemention is its principal navigation structure based on a large (200+ term) taxonomy written in the form of first person "I" statements like "I need emergency housing services", "I have questions about STI's HIV, AIDS and other related issues". These statements are organized into five "domains"--education, employment, health, housing, and social--reflecting the broadest categorization of the social service resources listed on the site.

Users navigate the resources by drilling down in each domain through a series of these statements, for example: Housing > I need somewhere to stay right away. > I need a shelter > I'm LGTBQ. As a user clicks into the hierarchy, a refined list of resources appears (powered by a View that takes the current taxonomy term ID with depth as an argument). Each taxonomy term description appears as a sort of help text on each of these pages, and together with all the descriptions of all the other taxonomy terms in the same domain, constitutes a sort of glossary for that domain accessible through the domain's landing page.

A taxonomy with four levels of hierarchy poses some UI issues both for administering the site and for site visitors. These were solved using a few contrib modules and small bit of custom code. For the site's administrators and contributors, the Hierarchical select module eases the selection of statements from the large vocabulary. For site visitors, we wanted to display the number of resources (nodes) associated with each statement (term), as well as all the child statements, similar to faceted search results. This small bit of custom code displays results on both the main "domain" page as well as on each resource listing page, where a custom block of child statements allows the user to drill down further towards the resources that best match their needs. A few other contrib modules provide some of the other bells and whistles on the site. These include among others:

• With the Avatar select module, users can choose from one of 40 avatars created by the client with their specific audience in mind, using www.faceyourmanga.com.
• We used Node Import module to import content provided by the client.
• The Location and Gmap modules were used to place maps on each page, and the location data stored in the Location module populates a direct link to a page on www.hopstop.com, a site widely used by youth in NYC for public transit directions.

Ron Akanowicz served as the Information Architect for the project working with the client to develop user stories and then wireframes. Jozef Toth designed the simple, bold theme, and implemented it using a Zen subtheme. Kevin Walsh served as the Technical Lead and principle engineer with support from Robin Barre and Owen Barton and the entire project team was managed by Justine Hirsch. Future developments on the site may include faceted search, better mobile browsing, and map-based navigation of resources.