<< Open Translate | ProBono Maps of BC >> ProBono Law Society of BC

The Probono Law of BC site was a project I helped develop with Jeremy Gruman of Jeremedia, throughout the summer of 2006. The excellent front-end of the site was designed by Jeremy; I developed and designed the backend content management software (JavaScript, PHP and MySQL) and the UI for using the various components. I thought I'd include this project in the Web Design Portfolio section of my site since I'm rather pleased the work I did on the UI. It's a nice case study in how a designer (Jeremy) and myself could co-ordinate to produce a non-trivial web application.

The project itself was quite extensive and includes some very nice features which have proven to be of great use to the PBLBC. Here are a few of the highlights:

• Five levels of user access for administrators, project co-ordinators, lawyers, non-lawyer legal professionals and community groups. Each user type could log in and gain access to content specific to them.
• Administrator functionality includes:
  • Create, edit, delete and search legal cases.
  • Option to change status of legal cases, each of which has different effects (e.g. hiding from certain lawyers, removing from showing in coordinator listings). These statuses include: new, consulting, distributed, matched, rejected, stale, dead and closed.
  • Full management controls for user accounts.
  • Option to map cities to customized "regions", which lets co-ordinators match cases to lawyers based on geographical region.
  • Option to upload images for site content, which can be cropped through a JavaScript tool (Scriptaculous-based). They are automatically resized to fit, and thumbnails are created in greyscale.
  • File upload option to upload relevant files to the site. Links to these files are automatically included in emails sent to lawyers, so they can view all information about a case.
• Co-ordinator functionality includes:
  • Simple way to contact lawyers with case information by mass-selecting lawyers in the cases' region and sending emails to all of them at once.
  • Option to match a particular lawyer to a case
  • Option to email lawyers, non-lawyer legal professionals and community groups with their login information
• Other functionality includes:
  • Automatic status-change for cases which go for a certain period without being modified. This generates emails sent to the administrator and co-ordinators as reminders to re-examine a case.
  • Full options for lawyers, non-lawyer legal professionals and community groups to edit their user account information and contact information.
  • Lawyers may log in and view all "stale" cases and information about cases that have been assigned to them.