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Recent Experience

Open-Source Community

Jennifer Hodgdon, Poplar ProductivityWare's lead developer, is an active volunteer member of the community that builds and maintains the open-source Drupal software, its documentation, and its modules. In the past she has also been quite active in the WordPress development and documentation community, though lately she is mostly working on Drupal. Highlights:

Work for Clients

Here is a list of projects Poplar ProductivityWare has recently completed for clients. Please contact us if you need something similar.

Drupal Projects

  • Built a community portal for a software company's user base, based in Drupal, where users can participate in forums and submit case studies to the site.
  • Built a Drupal-based site to showcase an environmental group's work, including sophisticated image management with slideshows and videos, and a section higlighting news coverage of their organization.
  • Built a Drupal-based site for a green building industry group, including searchable member profiles that the members can update themselves (PHP).
  • Built a Drupal-based site for a group of eye care centers, including a searchable eyeglass frame showcase, a quiz, and cross-listings for locations and doctors (PHP/JavaScript).
  • Built a Drupal-based site for a property management company, including several pages with dynamic slide shows, rotating quotes, and property listings with suite details and demographic information. Involved creating a custom CCK field type module (PHP/MySQL/JavaScript).
  • Built a Drupal-based site where users can register and create listings with geographic information, and rate each others' listings (PHP/JavaScript/Google Maps API).
  • Built a Drupal-based site for a roofing company, including a custom theme, a roofing materials listing page, a zip-code search for past projects, a featured customer view, and a gallery of past projects by roofing material (all of the project/customer views were generated from the same entered content data) (PHP).
  • Created many custom Drupal modules for clients, including:
    • A module that makes it easy to integrate Twitter feeds into the core Drupal "Aggregator" module (PHP).
    • Several modules that add custom fields for use within CCK (see our article on creating CCK field modules for more information and module download) (PHP).
    • A module that displays all users' profiles in one long page, for a high-school reunion web site (PHP).
    • A module that reads legacy point-of-sale system data into the Drupal E-Commerce module, so that prices and inventory numbers are kept in synch between the web site and retail store (PHP/MySQL).
    • Modules that allow users to answer questions submitted by other site visitors and review products, making sure that only the latest answer/review by each person for a given question/product is kept (PHP/MySQL).

WordPress Projects

  • Created a custom WordPress plugin for conference management, including sessions, tracks, schedule pages, proposed sessions, session ratings, and sponsorship click-through tracking (PHP/MySQL).
  • Created a custom WordPress plugin to manage and display featured properties, including random selection of which properties to display for each site visitor from the active choices, for the sidebar of a vacation rental web site (PHP/MySQL).
  • Modified a WordPress feed aggregator plugin so that it would import automatically whenever someone visited the site, only import excerpts from the posts, and only import posts containing particular keywords (PHP/RSS/XML).
  • Created custom WordPress themes for several sites, working from designers' mock-ups (PHP).
  • Modified a WordPress theme to handle "boolean" searches, so users could see a list of all the site's categories, check off several categories, and find posts that matched all of them.
  • Held several interactive work/tutoring sessions with a client, where we installed and upgraded WordPress blog software, modified and built several WordPress templates with CSS, installed and modified WordPress plugins, and migrated a Movable Type blog to WordPress (MySQL/PHP/HTML/CSS).

Integration with Web Services

Several of the projects above involved integrating Google Maps with WordPress or Drupal. In addition, Poplar ProductivityWare has worked with other web services:

  • Created a Facebook application that displays a Tip of the Day, and allows application users to submit their tips for consideration. An administrative interface outside of Facebook allows the application owners to choose tips to display for each day (PHP/MySQL).
  • Created a Facebook application that lets users submit suggestions, and other users rate the suggestions, with prizes granted for the most popular submitters and suggestions (PHP/MySQL).
  • Created scripts to manage a process where the Amazon Mechanical Turk web service is used to gather specific information about blogs, and the information is stored in a database (XML/Perl/CGI/LWP/DBI/MySQL/AWS).
  • Created scripts to manage a process where the Amazon Mechanical Turk web service is used to judge blogger's opinions, and the posts and opinions are displayed in a WordPress site (XML/Perl/CGI/LWP/DBI/MySQL/AWS/WordPress/XMLRPC).

Ad-Hoc Web Programming Projects

  • Created an AJAX/JavaScript/Perl system for displaying RSS feeds on a web page. Contact us if you are interested in licensing this application for use on your web site.
  • Created a browser-based application for reviewing the results of clinical drug trials, where all of the menus and page content is dynamically generated from XML files, which works in both Firefox and Internet Explorer 6/7 (XML/XSLT/JavaScript/JQuery/HTML/CSS).
  • Wrote custom JavaScript scripts to validate input and calculate prices on a photo scanning form for a web site (JavaScript).
  • Reorganized a members-only file download site for a business consortium, so that users who log in would automatically see a sorted list of files they have permission to download, with links to download them. Management of file permissions and users is through a password-protected admin page (PHP/MySQL/HTML).
  • Created a password-protected on-line membership database for a non-profit organization, which allows all members of the board, including those who are less tech-savvy, to view and edit member information from their homes on their choice of web browsers (PHP/MySQL/HTML).
  • Converted an HTML eyeglass frame showcase site to PHP/MySQL, so that the slide show's images, captions, and slide order could be updated more easily by the designer.
  • Integrated JavaScript and PHP/MySQL into a real estate developer's web site, so that the site owner can easily update prices, house details, and availability, and the user can look at the information in several different formats, on several different pages. Also created various mouse-over and pop-up effects.
  • Converted an HTML vacation condo rental site to PHP/MySQL, so that the order of the listings could rotate every few days, with one rental being "featured", and for easier maintenance. Also added drop-down menus (PHP/MySQL/HTML/JavaScript/CSS).
  • Created a site for clients to download tax documents from an accounting firm, including management page for firm personnel; advised firm on security issues and remedies (PHP/MySQL/HTML/JavaScript).
  • Added client file upload capability to a web site (Perl/CGI/HTML).

Palm OS Applications

  • Re-developed and improved a Palm OS application for use by drivers of newspaper delivery trucks. The application downloads daily delivery list from a server, records adjustments and previous-issue returns, and uploads the completion, adjustment, and return information to the server at the end of the day (C, prc-tools, TCP/IP, XML).
  • Added features, improved flexibility through better database usage, and improved usability of an existing Palm OS application, which allows employees of a weekly cars-for-sale magazine to note features of the cars they are photographing for the magazine (C, prc-tools).
  • Our free downloads and articles contain additional examples of software we have written for Palm OS and other platforms.

Other Custom Software

  • Reviewed documentation for a Java-based software development kit, and verified its completeness by developing four sample communications-related applications (Java/Servlet/UDP).
  • Created software that measures regulatory compliance for a telephone company, including non-compliance penalties, and collects the results into reports (S-Plus/Excel/VBA).
  • Developed software that calculates the optimal times to turn generating plants on and off, for an electric utility (Excel/VBA/C/DLL).
  • Added to the time-series analysis capabilities of an existing statistical software package (S-Plus/C).
  • Created project budget tracking reports for an architecture firm, which combine payroll and direct cost information from the firm's accounting software with project completion status information from the project managers (PeachTree/Access/Excel/VBA).
  • Developed a commission-tracking report for a real estate company, which reads information from multiple commission spreadsheets, and calculates office and agent statistics (Excel/VBA).
  • Created a software application to calculate buy/sell signals for a complicated stock option trading system (Visual Basic).
  • Investigated and reduced speed bottlenecks in financial report generation software (Java/JSP/EJB).
  • Our free downloads and articles contain additional examples of software we have written using various platforms and languages.