NCDD.com offers a number of services to members of an organization of lawyers and to their clients. It provides resources for attorneys and the public, provides communication with the membership, and allows the public to locate an attorney.

The Problem

This site required a complex set of resources and databases for both logged-in, registered members and the general public. Attorneys use the site for research materials and to stay abreast of recent developments in their field. Visitors can access more basic materials for general education about the law in this area. The site needs to support communication between the organization and the membership, and the public needs to be able to locate appropriate members of the organization to represent them.

Management of the site by the organization requires a complex content management system to maintain all aspects of this information flow.

Features required:

• On-line presentation of organization and services
• Database of users and user tracking system
• Database of attorneys
• Interface to third-party library of archival documents
• Multiple classes of accounts with log-in protection
• Attorney search by various properties
• Real-time e-commerce payment
• Shopping cart for attorney materials
• Contact forms and mail management.
• Forms for download and/or on-line completion
• News and other dynamic content pages
• Streaming video
• Blog
• Webinar interface
• Resources links
• Full-text and structured search
• Administrative screens and content management system

The Solution

Because of the diversity of content management requirements we developed the code using Joomla, which is a flexible content management system running on a framework of PHP ( a web programming language) and MySQL (a database implementation.) Joomla offers a number of utilities well-suited to the interactive functions of the site.

We created a membership and login system and used session-tracking to control access to materials and services available on the site.

The attorney search function had a requirement for the order in which names appeared and we implemented a primary search based on location with a secondary ordering that took into account both class of membership and length of time the attorney had been a member of the organization.

Joomla modules were used to implement news feeds, blogs, text search, and similar features, along with a shopping cart for sale of items to the membership only. A streaming video presentation facility was also incorporated.

Finally an administrative system was implemented with content management capability for multiple categories of information and upload of documents and images.