Six Feet Up Helps SFARI with Web Maintenance Work

Following the launch of the Simon Foundation Autism Research Initiative (SFARI) new Plone-based website in the Fall of 2011, the research institute has asked Six Feet Up to make a series of updates, mostly to their forums and wiki mechanism, as well as to their system performance.

Six Feet Up added various plug-ins to the Vanilla forums to facilitate online collaboration between autism researchers. Some of the enhancements include enabling threaded discussions to make it easier to reply to specific online comments. Six Feet Up also added tagging capabilities to the SFARI research discussion forums to simplify the discovery of active topics and the participation in the discussions. Finally, the development team enabled the creation of private groups to make it possible for some of the discussions to be invitation-only: people can request to join but have to be granted permission to join private groups.

SFARI also asked for various enhancements to their Moin Moin wiki system. Dynamic indexing, as well as an alphabetical listing of the wiki page titles, were implemented. Any new wiki page now gets automatically added to the computer-generated table of contents. Six Feet Up also deployed a live search capability to the Moin Moin wiki pages so as to match the live search that comes out of the box with Plone. Later on, the developers will work on adding the ability for the wiki homepage to be read-only.

Finally, Six Feet Up also performed several site performance improvements, including automating the database packing process to ensure it is done on a regular basis and fixing a Pubmed integration issue that was having a high impact on the site performance.

More enhancements are expected to be released in the next few months as part of the ongoing maintenance and support efforts provided by Six Feet Up to SFARI.