Developer Sought to Maintain Landscape Water Budget Calculators

The California Landscape Contractors Association seeks a developer to maintain weldcp.clcaengine.com and clcaengine.com. After many years of dedicated service, our current developer is retiring.

Technology currently used include CakePHP, JavaScript, jQuery and Adobe TypeKit.

Per Netcraft.

The ideal developer would manage all technical aspects of the site and its AWS hosting. Future upgrades include enhanced mobile responsiveness and overall improvements to the interface.

The association is receptive to proposals from developers who believe the current site is best retired and replaced with more modern technology.

The current developer is leaving on good terms and will support the transition to a new developer. He currently devotes four to five hours a month of maintenance and upgrades to our user interface.

About The Sites

The sites support the association’s water management certification programs and support. Approximately active 200 users use the sites to track landscape water use and budget for future use.

The websites are a tool to calculate and track landscape irrigation budget usage for landscape professionals seeking to either obtain or maintain their CLCA Certified Water Manager certification. Each user is given a login and password to their individual and or company account. Supervisors and clients are also given a login and password and the ability to view the professional’s progress.

The tool creates a unique scientific landscape irrigation budget for users based on their client’s landscape size, square footage of each plant factor (lawn, shrubs, trees, etc.), current irrigation type, city’s historical Evapotraspiration monthly/annual data.

Landscape professionals are responsible for maintaining this unique budget as a landscape water manager and making sure the site does not consume more than its budgeted amount of water. Water managers maintain the budgets by reading their sites water meter readings on a weekly/monthly basis. The tool then uses this meter reading to calculate usage and percentage over/under budget to measure their progress as a water manager.

The tool can also create historical reports based on individual or company usage. The tool can create client reports that graph annual usage or that can be used as a sales tool for landscape professionals selling their services.

The tool also helps administration track certification, water budget progress, number of participants, number of sites and regions with the highest number of participants. Users also get monthly reminders to input their meter readings to obtain or maintain their certifications.

Recent upgrades include:

  • Changing artwork to eliminate logos of past sponsors
  • Updating the email reminders
  • Adding a message function and sending out mass emails about updates
  • Changing usage graphs from a line graph to a bar graph
  • Adding over budget warnings
  • Allowing weekly/date stamped entries for more pro-active users
  • Moving site to AWS host
  • Creating a more user-friendly tool bar
  • Adding user’s certification status on homepage
  • Develop new “Portfolio Manager” functionality
  • Creating reports in downloadable PDF and Excel formats
  • Creating a water pricing per HCF tool that can be attached to water agencies to calculate water in dollars

Recent maintenance examples include:

  • Fix discrepancies for sites’ displayed “Last Reading Date” in “Company Reports” for certain sites with meter deactivated this year
  • Fixing specific calculation issues or anomalies with specific sites
  • Requiring all users to create a new company when registering info
  • Fine tune queries used to retrieve site data so that only meta-data for “Site Attachment” are retrieved
  • Review current implementation of spry validation widgets on registration pages to evaluate feasibility of relocating validation of error messages from invalid field to bottom page
  • Fixing specific issues on reporting like latest readings not having the correct Month/Year
  • Lag issues with certain pages with graphs taking too long to load
Updated: June 2, 2022

Interested?

Questions and proposals to maintain the site should be sent to cakephp@clca.org.