Growing Venture Solutions - GVS - Community

DrupalCon Chicago 2011 Site

Ezra — Fri, 27 May 2011 21:15:29 +0000

Attendance numbers at DrupalCon conferences have dramatically increased over the past several years, so the non-profit Drupal Association decided to invest in the Conference Organizing Distribution (COD) as a standardized platform for building DrupalCon sites. The Drupal Association hired GVS to add several new features to COD, and support the local DrupalCon Chicago site-building team, staffed by Palantir.net.

The DrupalCon Chicago site features a highly versatile schedule, and a Birds of a Feather (BoF) scheduling tool that allows attendees to self-schedule their own informal sessions into designated slots in the session calendar.

The site also features organizer-curated sessions, as well as session proposals and community voting, to help select additional sessions. Attendees can filter the lists of sessions by Track, Skill level and keywords, and create a personalized schedule of sessions.

One of the site requirements was integration with the RegOnline registration system. GVS built and released the RegOnline API module. While Drupal has great tools for selling tickets and managing attendee data, it's great to have more options for integration with third party services if that is required by a particular event.

Following the success of the DrupalCon Chicago site, future Drupalcon teams are using COD to build the sites for the upcoming London 2011 and Denver 2012 DrupalCon websites.

visit the site

Hyperlocal News Installation profile

Greg — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 21:25:01 +0000

The Hyperlocal News installation profile is an "internal project" for some of the folks at GVS. Profiles are ways to bundle together Drupal, some contributed modules, and the configuration necessary to make the site actually do something cool. Users are presented with an wizard that sets up their site and does all the configuration necessary to get something to work.

History of the site: Denver's Baker Neigborhood

We originally built this as just a site for us to write about our local neighborhood: Bakernow.com. You can also see it in work on Ice Cream Denver

Releasing the code: thanks Ryan Ornelas

We were contacted about the site by Ryan Ornelas who wanted to use it himself. Ryan was kind enough to sponsor our work releasing the site as an install profile so that not only he but everyone could use it.

Available on Drupal.org

Now the code is available as the hyperlocalnews project on drupal.org where people can download it for free, get support, provide ideas in the issue queue, and provide improvements in the form of patches.

Case study

We have written an in-depth case study of the BakerNow site implementation.

visit the site

Denver Spanish House

evelyn — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 20:39:14 +0000

Initial Project: Basic Site And Building Archives

DSH has a limited budget for advertising and had search engine optimization as a major goal. So, the purpose at first was simply to get content online to help build authority for keywords related to the site. This is when the movies, books, music, and wines sections were created. Those sections are now secondary to the main content on the site, but still bring in a fair amount of interested visitors and certainly helped to build search engine ranking for some of the main keywords important to the site.

Visual Pop: Making the Denver Spanish House Theme Fit the Brand

The next step was to really make the site attractive. Since DSH's brand is based on the idea of exploring culture in a rich, comfortable environment the site itself had to be visually attractive. Fortunately, the DSH had a large bank of photos to draw from, a great logo from 2fold Studio, and a few instructions to drive the design. The result is a rounded corner design that keeps the culture front and center in the form of "banners".

The banners at the top of most pages on the site are sliced out of photos taken by the DSH. They rotate randomly so that visitors can enjoy a wide variety of images.

Final Steps - Classes and Information Architecture on the Front Page

After a brainstorming session where we ranked the most important things to communicate to the customers we created a wireframe of the front page: classes at the top, then an "about" block and then Nikki herself, followed by lower priority topics. Some quick work with blocks, views, and panels and all of the site features and old pieces of content are pulled into no more than 1 click from the front page.

Denver Spanish House - Another Satisfied Customer

Nikki, the founder of Denver Spanish House, had this to say about the project:

"I love my website: it's dynamic, functional, and looks great! It's easy for me to add information, which allows me to be in control of my business and gives my clients the most up-to-date information. My website has been a great tool for my business. Not only has it been a great source of marketing but also a complete source of information for my customers. It's clear that Greg was not only concerned with building a great website, but the foundation for a successful business."

visit the site