Examples of Our Work
The Emerald Necklace Conservancy
The Emerald Necklace Conservancy needed to create an easy-to-edit website and community organization tool for their support of the Emerald Necklace park chain in the Boston area. FlowTheory Networks deployed an easy-to-use content management system so their on-staff, non-technical web editor could maintain their site's content. We developed database applications for their park network and their volunteer corps. We leveraged an eCommerce framework to create a secure online donation gateway and an online ticket sales system for fundraiser events. As a non-profit organization, the Conservancy did not have a great deal to commit to the project, and FlowTheory's use of rapid development, free software tools allowed us to create the solutions they needed at a cost far below what other firms could offer.
The FSF Store
The Free Software Foundation used a large one-page order form and a Emacs mode to handle the dozens of items in their store, processing all payments and shipping by hand. That system was replaced with the Satchmo web store, a custom shipping calculator to identify the most appropriate shipping options, and a custom authentication handler to link to their Zope-based central user database. Additionally, all sales transactions were linked back ot their central contact database for later fundraising purposes.
"We asked Joshua to replace our archaic store with something more modern that would automate as many of the manual order fulfillment tasks as possible and be intuitive to use. His decision to deploy the cutting edge Django-based Satchmo product and customize it for our needs not only showed impressive judgement, familiarity, and skill at the time, we're also happily using it two years later." - John Sullivan, Operations Manager
FSF/UNESCO Free Software Directory
The Free Software Directory website was generated daily from parsing a series of manually maintained text files, each one representing a project in the directory. As manually maintained data does, it was filled with typographic errors, duplications, and inconsistencies. That system was replaced with a Django application, using Django models to represent projects, languages, licenses, developers, and more. A Python script was composed to process the legacy text files, clean the data automatically, and insert it into the models. Front-end caching, assured the database intense application was served as quickly as possible.