Robust online faculty/staff/office directory system?

[Doug Thompson]

Currently, we have a hodge-podge of static pages, old-school Perl-generated pages, and a few other things that, collectively, make up the "Directories" area of our website.

Lately, there have been quite a bit of questions/suggestions for looking into replacing this with a proper database-driven system that can provide this major functionality:

• The ability to search for an employee by name.
• The ability to search for a campus office by name.
• The ability to provide consistent (templated?) search results. For example, a staff member would include a photo, job title, contact information, etc. A faculty member would include all this as well as things like a CV, recent publications list, office hours, areas of expertise, if they are willing to be considered an "expert source" for media-relations purposes, etc. A campus office would include a photo, office hours, etc.
• Other niceties such as social sharing, RSS feeds, and anything else relevant.
• Preferably open source (or, at least, ultra-low-cost). Something that can be installed/maintained with a minimum amount of programming/customization.

Has anyone seen, created, or otherwise been involved in such a system? Or, if there aren't any decent open-source/low-cost solutions, what are some of the "best" systems out there for this purpose?

Just trying to get a handle on what may ultimately be involved if we explore this route in more detail.

Thanks.

[Doug Thompson]

Rather than specific solutions, if anyone has any good examples of well-done pages/sites of this nature, that would be great to have as well...

[Daniel Bashaw]

To add a specific twist to the question, has anyone created a directory system like this in WordPress, perhaps using plugins or Types and Views? As a smaller university with hundreds rather than thousands of directory entries, something built in WP that integrates with WP user profiles might be a good self-maintaining solution to our very similar 'hodge-podge' of directory pages.