Orthopaedia is a medical research site with a difference: it is built from the breadth of knowledge and expertise of its users – essentially a Wikipedia for orthopaedic medicine. Gossamer Threads was contacted by Orthopaedia after their previous developer had been unable to meet their needs. We quickly realised that there was a lot of work ahead of us.

Keeping the core up to date

The site had been built around Confluence, an enterprise-level wiki platform, but had not been updated to stay current with recent versions. There were two challenges facing us: first, updating Orthopaedia’s core Confluence installation, and second, ensuring that features provided by long-since abandoned plugins would not be lost in the transition to the current version.

To deal with these problems, we first performed the main Confluence update, then modified the code of all incompatible plugins, ensuring that no functionality was lost after the update.

I want a second opinion. And a third. And a fourth…

In addition to maintenance work, we helped Orthopaedia complete some exciting new features. As well as adding a batch video upload (and Flash conversion) feature to Confluence, we completed a “case study” plugin.

A crayola oblongata may be this patient’s only hope.

This plugin gives doctors who use Orthopaedia can post photos and videos of x-rays and patient reports, and tap into the collective experience of the site’s user base – conferring with other doctors around the globe to better evaluate and diagnose their patients’ conditions. Doctors can poll their colleagues, offering them diagnosis and treatment choices, view the results, and manage their own invitations to contribute to case studies using a convenient dashboard interface.

Orthopaedia is a great example of how there are still exciting and unique applications of familiar web platforms (like wikis). At Gossamer Threads we love being able to partner with innovative sites like this, and provide them with the technical expertise they need.

Tags: Customization, Video