EDRA Writeup

The Environmental Design Research Association (www.edra.org) is a 600 member professional association of academics and design practitioners interested in the impact of the physical environment on human behavior.  Our organization has 20 "Networks", essentially domain area interest groups.  I (Danny Mittleman) have been webmaster for about three years.   Our current Joomla site was launched June 2007 replacing a traditional static "brochure" site.  We are running our association membership database and conference registration database in CiviCRM integrated into our site.  

We upgraded from Joomla 1.0 to 1.5 in January 2009.

We are currently developing schemes to overhaul the skin in conjunction with adding JomSocial features for member networking.  Our JomSocial installation will be interesting in that we intend to bridge that database to CiviCRM (never done before to the best of our knowledge) so that users will not be asked to maintain redundant profiles.   Further, we are not interested in individual social networking, rather we need to support our 20 networks - so we will sculpt the JomSocial feature set to emphasize the group features.

An additional complexity we are looking to address is that our webmaster team is now three people.  We are looking for ways to better maintain standards and coordinate work among the team.

Daniel Mittleman
DePaul University CDM