Jobs Today Southeast Texas, a publication of the Examiner Corporation of Beaumont Texas, wanted a site that could display job postings provided by their clients in an attractive and dynamic fashion. They also wanted an easy and efficient way to input and update the 400+ listings they post per month. Their current provider used a home built system that did not have the flexibility and expandability that Jobs Today required.

With a necessity to have a specialized job post content type that fit the format the clients were providing and a nice, simple, attractive way to serve the content to the browser we decided that Drupal would be the framework of choice. I created custom content types for both the employer and job posting with many features that Jobs Today may choose to use in the future. The display of both the front and Job Listings page is controlled completely by the content maintainer selecting a few configuration boxes in the administration section. Drupal out-of-the-box also offers powerful bulk processing of content which is also made available to the maintainers.

Advertisement areas on the right sidebar and content bottom position are very flexible and Jobs Today can post text, image and HTML ads in any of these positions. These positions can also be used for any other type of content like announcements and such. Click tracking is provided by the module itself except in the case of HTML ads which can be tracked by the powerful Google Analytics module.

Jobs Today also wanted some visual enhancements and a "Whiz-Bang Wow!" feature. I used the magical jQuery JavaScript library (included with Drupal) for the featured job rotator on the front page and the job description flyout on the Job Listings page. They really wanted a walk on the screen feature which I accomplished using an open source Flash video player with data served via jQuery.

The visual design is custom using a theme purchased from DreamTemplate. The only thing left from the original code is some of the colors and the layout css. Except for the main color choice, I was given free rein with the display creation. I am using some new CSS3 display techniques like rounded corners and drop shadows so users of Firefox, Chrome and Safari will have a better experience than users of Microsoft Internet Explorer.

The method of content creation and management is basic Drupal. I arranged the fields in the administration section in the order that I thought would be most convenient for the maintainers. Training is provided by screencast videos and email communication. Some features like "scheduling", "add another post" and "titles" have been added since the videos were made.

I really enjoyed the opportunity to work on this site with all of its customization. I feel that Jobs Today received a quality product at a reasonable price and I was able to learn a few new techniques along the way.