What is CLIENT II?

CLIENT II is a funding measure of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research of the Federal Republic of Germany (BMBF), which supports demand-oriented research cooperations with selected emerging and developing countries.

The website presents all funding projects in detail, as well as news, events and other information about CLIENT II.

Development process

Together with robole and Knick Design I had the opportunity to realize this project for a ministry in my home country, which was also my first big project as a freelancer.

My task was to set up the website's CMS, which had to be Drupal. Not having much experience with the CMS itself, I had to become familiar with it before I could get started. Since I was used to working with fairly modern technologies, Drupal felt a bit like a relic from a bygone era, which affected my motivation a bit. Nonetheless, I convinced myself that this project is a big deal for me and I certainly wanted it to be good. Once I implemented the basic content structure, I managed to build up some momentum, and the more I got comfortable with Drupal, the less it felt like a burden to work with.

After the Drupal setup was complete, I used Mapbox to create an interactive world map with various filtering features to show all the different funding projects on the front-end.

In the end, it wasn't the most fun project I've ever been involved in, but I learned a lot about CMS, such as how to structure content data and set up editing workflows. I also learned that Drupal is not something I will pursue in the future, which is also good to know. Last but not least, I'm nevertheless proud to have been able to contribute to the development of a useful platform.