LocalEcoForum.org is a completely transparent staging ground for environmental organizations, local government, and individuals to work together on solving environmental problems pertaining to their own community. This website will facilitate environmental action and awareness on the local level by creating a system for proposing projects, working with others to complete those projects, and sharing information that will help solve problems. While creating massive change may be a slow progress, you can make a change in your community today and we hope you will join us.

Welcome to the Prototype

LocalEcoForum is currently being developed and not yet ready for the public. The developer R.J. Steinert is currently looking for funding so he can devote his time to finishing the necessary Drupal modules for this project. If you're here it's probably because I sent you an account to test out. Go ahead and login to the left.

Want to contact me? Send me a message on my LevelSky contact form.

Three Modules in Development On This Site

“Briefcase with Stickies and Voting module” (that’s all one module)
To help communities connect the dots in a sea of content, I have begun development of a new Drupal module called “Briefcase with Stickies and Voting”. This module allows a user to place any piece of content on the site in their briefcase and then leave a sticky (a link) of that piece of content on any other content on the site. To place content in your briefcase, click on the briefcase image with the + on it while on any piece of content on the site. To tag a piece of content with a sticky, navigate to that piece of content and then click on the tiny green sticky on the corresponding briefcase item. If you’re unsure of what the item in your briefcase is exactly, click the corresponding magnifying glass to see a preview of that content slide out below the briefcase item. The module goes a step further and allows users to vote on a sticky’s relevancy. Click on the sticky’s corresponding +1 button and your vote will be automatically counted. All of this functionality happens without a page reload thanks to Drupals built in javascript library jQuery. I would recommend browsing the site using Mozilla’s Firefox as I have not yet had time to test the CSS formatting in Internet Explorer.

I am aware that the Knights Foundation funded a similar project for the Drupal community last year but the results of that project are unclear. The only module that could have been the result of that project as far as I can tell is the Related Links module. Unfortunately the Manual Links portion of the module has not worked on any installation of Drupal I have ever used myself or seen. My Briefcase module provides an easy to use interface, coupled with features that work well together, and allows modern browsers to make use of AJAX. Further development will provide the following features:

  • A drag and drop feature for organizing the briefcase items in folders and tabs.
  • A user history tab in the briefcase
  • Improved AJAX functionality including indications for when an AJAX request is being processed.
  • Administrative interface for customizing color schemes and buttons

“Local Organic Groups module”
The next module I am going to develop for this project will be Local Organic Groups. This will be a helper module for the existing Location and Organic Group module. The goal is to create a system similar to the “networks” on Facebook. This system will kick in upon a user’s registration as it will check to see if the town/state/zipcode combination they have provided matches any existing group’s town/state/zipcode. If their combination does match, my helper module will automatically join them to that group. If there is no match, then a new group will be made for that combination and they will be added to it. They will then be able to see the surrounding town’s groups as well and join them if they choose to. This will be made possible through Drupal's hook_user() function when $op = 'submit'. Other features will include a landing page for anonymous users where content will reflect their location through an approximation using their IP address. This module will be very powerful for any site that is looking to tailor user generated content to a user’s area and also allow users to find content is other specific communities.

“Community Project module”
The last module I will develop for this project will be called the Community Project module. The goal of this module will be to develop a custom content (node) type for developing proposals as a community, facilitating the progress in a maintained group, and finally presenting the data in a fashion that when the project is completed, the resulting summary is useful for other communities. The entire project will be planned and executed using a storyboard interface that will break down tasks and the time frame. I’m currently using the Workflow module to control the state of the project in the Prototype and I may incorporate that module as a requirement for Community Project.