So for the last several months, I've been head-down in a large BuildingGreen project called LEEDuser. For those of you in the know about LEED, skip a paragraph or two...
According to its creators at the United States Green Building Council (USGBC):
The Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System™ encourages and accelerates global adoption of sustainable green building and development practices through the creation and implementation of universally understood and accepted tools and performance criteria.
To translate: LEED is a points-based system (attained through various "credits") wherein you document your process and success with a new or existing building and you get a little more than karma out of it - you get an energy-efficient building that will provide a return on investment. But the submission process can be complex and involved. It's just the nature of the beast: a lot of data, a lot of details (and people) to track down.
Enter LEEDuser (welcome back, learned people!):
So there is a vacuum of solid advice when it comes to LEED certification, mostly filled by third-party consultants. Expensive ones, sometimes. (Come on! You know it's true!) But they have great advice about when & how to do certain things, what credits are slamdunks in certain situations, and which ones to avoid (or at least be careful about) because they can be real money pits without the proper preparation and execution. This vacuum is also where LEEDuser comes in.
We partnered with YRG Sustainability Consultants, a global-reach LEED consultancy, for a slew of the content, exercised our editorial muscles around creating a solid peer-to-peer voice throughout, and stretched Drupal in wonderful ways to meet our goals. Now, all of the sexiness didn't fall from the sky or pop out of the drupal installation - we had some very gifted design folks help us imagine (and reimagine!) the front-end features and a couple of contract developers worked on theming it up for Drupal. Then we continued to massage it - in fact, we're still working on this beta-release product.
In all, it does a great job playing the role of highly paid consultant: tips to get you on the right track with picking compliance paths, Getting It Done action items for your team, even a Documentation Toolkit to walk you through the worst of that preparation. Per Credit. In a bunch of rating systems. It's INSANE how good this is at delivering the required content. Try doing this by reading twenty blogs a day for a year... Having it in one place, with the official USGBC credit language right there on the screen for your reference? Impossibly awesome and without a single peer in this and many regards.
Oh, and we walk you through Strategies you can implement to get your credits, show Project Lessons (case studies) in context, show Related Products (a "best of") to get you pointed to the right products & manufacturers... The list is kind of long. Just get a login.
Getting technical: The codebase - excepting the theme, of course - is very, very low on custom code. "So you had to work less on code? Why do you think ANYBODY cares??" Well, yeah... But ask any application management professional what's better to support: Custom/In-House or Delivered+Configured Apps. While a Drupal instance may be somewhere in between, this particular property is toward the Delivered+Configured side of the equation. Fewer things that move around and break on update, hopefully, because the development was mostly vetted by a community of developers, versus "a roomful of smart guys." Don't get me wrong: I love rooms full of smart guys. But I'll take the big swelling mess of smarter guys any day.
So that's it. Insane hours at times. Crazy awesome ajax callbacks across the board. Drupal (taxonomies in particular) pushed to the max to tie stuff together. A real focus on what content is important and then it's {poof} delivered. I just could not be happier with the result, and know that we are creating a greener, more sustainable world in the process.
Note: Most of this is, of course, the opinion of a guy who spend months immersed in organizing information and configuring a content management system around it. You should probably ask a LEED AP (the dudes who know that credit language like a Baptist preacher knows Luke) for real-world examples and validation. Remember: when in doubt, ask an expert... or register at LEEDuser.com. :)