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Since last November, I’ve been working with Rene Craft and Kimberly Webb of TheWaitingRoom.net. They came to me via Dave Claunch of Liaison Resources. They were looking for some pro bono help building a web site.

Basically, what they wanted was a web site where parents could come and share resources with each other…and not just any resources, but resources for their kids with special needs. It may seem like a normal, every-day thing for most people to find (say) a barber for their child, but if you have a child with autism, this simple exercise becomes quite complicated.

Parents in this environment are also naturally skeptical. I should know. I watched my parents ride the emotional roller coaster when they were trying to find people to help them with my brother Robert, who has severe and profound autism (he is 35 this year and still doesn’t speak and can’t take care of himself). The only way to make this kind of web site work was to allow parents to share information with each other.

Our initial metaphor was Craigslist. We thought that a system that would allow parents to post “classifieds” about different places they have had good (and bad!) experiences with would be a good start. After two rounds of user testing, we figured out that this metaphor needed tweaking. Instead of classifieds, parents thought in terms of resources.

I did all the coding in CodeIgniter. The initial effort was about 15 hours of work over three days. Subsequently, I’ve completed about a dozen mini-rounds of about 1 to 2 hours each, all of that work happening between New Year’s Day and last night. There will likely be more work completed as we go forward.

From the very beginning, I opted for an agile approach. I asked them a series of questions about what their goals were, and then we examined wikis, blogs, and other software to see if it would fit the bill. When we realized that we would need custom software, I told them that I would be happy to build it in CodeIgniter, especially since I was writing a book on the subject and may be able to use the case study in the book.

Once I knew I was building an application from scratch, I sat with them and started diagramming screens. The first initial loadout happened over three days and represented an extremely rudimentary site–home page, category views, resource views, and a way for users to register for free and start creating resources on the site.

As we progressed, I added the comment feature, the flags system to indicate problematic resources (the system automatically marks a resource as problematic once enough users flag it), and streamlined the process of approving resources for publication. Originally, I had coded in an email-verification system a la Craigslist, but figured out in user testing that it wasn’t necessary. All users needed was a way to preview their resource before publishing it.

Right before going live, we added a “share with a friend” feature, and added a WordPress blog to allow the founders to talk to their community of parents.

From a technical perspective, the site consists of just a few database tables (to track resources, categories, registered users, comments, and even flags in case of problems with a resource), about 500 lines of code in the main controller, another 300 lines of code in the models, and about 15 view files. Most of the view files are actually includes that get pulled into other templates.

The application itself takes up just 384 KB of space (inside a 2.6 MB install of CodeIgniter 1.6 and all the images, css, and Javascript used to support the site).

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