We are looking for a team of Ruby on Rails experts to lead the development effort in creating a new web site. The web site will function as a search-able database of medical information and specialists. Users will be able to search for content related to their medical condition and find a doctor for treatment. Registered doctors and medical students will have the ability to add content (articles) to the web site. Site administrators will have a specific administration area for managing global site parameters.

PROJECT REQUIREMENTS:
The total development effort will include the following:

1) Convert HTML templates into Rails templates and partials.

2) Create features for two user groups:

A) Content Administrators (Doctors and Medical Students) - These users will be able to register, manage their profile and contribute articles to the site. Each Doctor and Medical Student will be able to add credential information to his/her profile. Additional information such as address, telephone and a profile image will be manageable.

B) Site Administrators - These users will have global rights to all content on the site. These users will be required to approve all new registrations. Additionally, Site Administrators can edit or delete doctor and medical student profile pages. Site administrators will also be allowed to categorize articles and doctor specialties into a tagging system.

3) Develop a free-form text search. This functionality should be created using existing plugins (see the section TECHNICAL CONSIDERATIONS below). Results will include medical professionals and articles written by doctors and medical students. Users will be able to narrow the search results by zip code and other parameters.

4) Integrate Google or Bing maps into Find a Doctor search results. Medical offices will appear within a Bing or Google map both in the search results area and within the profile detail page.

5) Develop AJAX driven pagination on all search results pages. AJAX pagination should be developed using deep linking in order to provide more reliable back and forth functionality between pages

6) Create a Medical Directory section that lists Treatments, Conditions, Ingredients, etc. This area will be supported by articles written by doctors and medical students. This area will function in a wiki-style format.

7) Retrieve data from multiple databases. Some doctor information will be stored externally.

VENDOR REQUIREMENTS:
1) Applicants for this project must have 2+ years in Ruby on Rails and jQuery development.
2) Qualified applicants must provide links to sites they have developed with Ruby on Rails
3) Applicants must submit a sample of code for our review. The code sample must contain the controller, model, helper, applicable views and tests that support a single set of functionality. Please provide a brief explanation of the functionality supported by the code sample. Do not omit the tests.

TECHNICAL CONSIDERATIONS:
This project will be developed in Ruby on Rails. AJAX will be used throughout the site to save, edit and validate data. jQuery will be used for client-side functionality and AJAX.

We will set up a staging environment for milestone reviews and testing.

Search functionality will be handled through the use of the Sphinx or Searchlogic plugin

Authentication will be handled through the Restful-Authentication plugin. User roles and role-based authentication will need to be built on top of the Restful-Authentication plugin.

The "Will Paginate" plugin will be used to provide pagination functionality on search results pages.

The "Acts as Taggable" plugin will be used for adding categories to doctor and medical student pages.

This application will use a local and external database. Rails will need to be set up to support two databases.


PROJECT TIMELINE:
Development for this project is expected to begin 3/16/2010.