A recent project we just tied up here at Cuberis was for Ecological Solutions, a Raleigh company that services stormwater retention ponds. We first made a simple website for them back in 2006 and last year they came back and approached us to redesign and expand their website. We love repeat customers!

This time, they not only wanted a place on the web to display their services to potential clients, but they also wanted a custom built system that would allow their field technicians to complete reports out in the field — while they are inspecting properties — and take the office staff minimal time to turn those field reports into service reports that their clients can view online.

In summary, their functionality requirements were:

• 3 levels of users to log into the site: Administrators, Field Technicians, and Clients
• Administrators can manage services, properties, and site visits
• Field Techs can submit site visit reports
• Clients can view their properties and completed site visit reports
• Properties have a set of default services, based on a set of pre-defined property types
• Site visits will have those default services for the property, but can be changed by Administrators on the fly.
• Administrators assign Field Techs to a site visit
• Fields Techs need to be able to fill out site visit reports on a mobile device.

With all the recent updates to WordPress, we knew that was the system we wanted to use to build out a custom CMS that could also handle all the custom reports we would need to create. I looked into several pre-built CRM (customer relationship management) plugins for WordPress but none of them fit the functionality we needed, so I decided to build one from scratch. The only plugins I used to help were: User Role Editor and Theme My Login. Those two plugins allowed me to create 3 levels of users with different permissions for what they can do on the website. They also have custom login pages that take them to their specific dashboards for viewing/managing their reports.

Usually when we create a WordPress website for clients, we make custom themes. This time, we created a custom plugin in addition to the usual custom theme. The custom plugin added 3 new custom post types: Services, Properties, and Site Visits. Each Service has a set of checklist items, which tell the Field Tech what needs to be completed at the Site Visit. The Service also has a custom taxonomy where it is assigned to a property type. Services and Properties share that custom taxonomy. This is so that when a Property is assigned a property type, the Services for that property type are automatically included.

The part of this custom buildout that will be most heavily used is the Site Visit custom post type. Administrators will create a Site Visit in the system each time a property needs to be inspected. They will choose a Property and all the default Services for that Property will be automatically included in the Site Visit. The Services can then be customized further if necessary. Once a Field Tech is assigned to a Site Visit, the Site Visit will appear on their dashboard with the date that it is to be completed. We made a custom mobile theme for the Site Visit admin edit screen so that Field Techs can easily fill out their reports on an iPhone. To do this, I used techniques from responsive web design like CSS media queries. If the screen is only as wide as Mobile Safari on iOS for the iPhone, then a different stylesheet is loaded. It’s pretty cool!

After a Field Tech completes a Site Visit report, an Administrator is notified. They can then make any notes for the client, or add photos taken in the field and then publish the report for the Client to view. When a client logs into the system, they get a list of all their Properties. After clicking on a property, they can see a schedule of upcoming site visits, and a list of previous site visits with all the reports available to view.

If you made it this far in reading this blog post, congratulations and I’m sorry. I managed to confuse myself about 10 times just in writing this, so I can just imagine what it must be like to someone outside my head. My point is, WordPress really can do so much more than just the basic portfolio or blog website. If you are interested in some big custom functionality, WP can probably do it for you. We love to take on exciting projects like this one so contact us for your web development needs!