MINDS

A plugin that manages a research group’s people, courses, and publications

MINDS is a research group at Politecnico di Torino (DAUIN). For its website I built PoliMinds, a custom WordPress plugin that manages the group’s entire directory — members, courses, collaborations — with a feature you rarely find on an academic site: every researcher’s publication list keeps itself up to date.

The plugin automatically syncs publications from ORCID, Google Scholar, IRIS, and Scopus, deduplicates them across three levels (DOI, source ID, fuzzy title-and-year matching), and assigns them to the right member by recognizing name variants in the author list. Each profile automatically shows publication count, citations, and h-index, always current without anyone entering them by hand.

Course pages calculate the correct academic year on their own based on the teaching period, and automatically generate the link to the course’s official page on Politecnico’s own site. All of it integrated into the group’s existing Avada theme (via Fusion Builder), with a Gutenberg fallback where needed.