Surgeon Today

Building a video-based social community site for surgeons.

Click image to enlargeHomepage

Click image to enlargeSpecialty Page

Sometimes the biggest, most laborious, most challenging projects are also the most rewarding.  Such is the case with Surgeon Today. This six-month monster of a site is basically a YouTube for Surgeons.  It is a closed community of members who are all surgeons or in related medical fields.  

The site allows members to choose one of 20 specialties such as Orthopedics, Neurosurgery or Hand Surgery.  From there, they get a customized homepage that delivers videos, editorials and other content directed at their chosen specialty. Users can upload videos, which are encoded using extremely high quality H.264 video codec and played back using a custom flash based video player that we built just for this site. The quality is really fantastic, even in full screen mode.  Users can also group several videos together and write an editorial about the series, sharing it with other users. Typical social website features such as discussions and commenting is also available throughout the site.

On top of developing the custom flash video player, we also developed quite a few custom extensions and plugins for the site. One of the most interesting piggybacks off of the Solspace User module, and allows members to invite other people to join the site as a "proxy". That is, once I accept the invitation and join, I am given permission to upload and edit content for the member who invited me. Members can have multiple proxies, and proxies can proxy for many members. This works wonderfully in the surgical community, as some groups, such as an Orthopedics group with multiple surgeons, may have an audio/video specialist or intern to manage content for the whole team.

The site overall has a fantastic clean design by Dee Pyshe. jQuery is heavily used throughout the site to enhance the user experience and speed navigation from one area to another. The site is also the first that we have decided is too technically enhanced to be usable by the small audience of Internet Explorer 6 users in the world, so they instead receive a friendly message asking them to upgrade.

The site owner wants to add a mobile version of the site, complete with optimized videos for the mobile platform.  We're looking forward to working again with Surgeon Today to enhance the community site even further.