Growing Venture Solutions - GVS - Technology

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.

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MeeGo 2010 and 2011 Conference Sites

Ezra — Fri, 27 May 2011 20:55:00 +0000

MeeGo has come to rely on the COD platform as a cost-effective way to spin up event sites with a familiar set of features, which is then customized for their event, including a dynamic session schedule that supports streaming and personalized attendee schedules.

GVS built the MeeGo Conference site and the Quango Design + Marketing agency contributed the design. The MeeGo project is an active sponsor of the Conference Organizing Distribution (COD) and funded many important early COD features, including initial design and implementation of the schedule view.

The 2011 conference site included integration with the Etouches hosted registration system, which resulted in the Etouches Drupal integration module, developed by Ezra Barnett Gildesgame of GVS.

Background

The MeeGo Conference 2010 was the first global MeeGo developer community conference. The conference took place on November 15-17, 2010 in Dublin, Ireland, and was held again 23-25 May 2011 in San Francisco, California.

The MeeGo community includes application developers, platform designers, and open source enthusiasts. The conference included keynotes, presentations, BoF (birds of a feather) discussions and product/idea showcases around hardware support, platform development, app development and the MeeGo project itself.

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Fusion Drupal Themes by TopNotchThemes

Greg — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 19:32:39 +0000

GVS partnered with TopNotchThemes team (a support client) and 3281d Consulting to build TNT's flagship e-commerce site, FusionDrupalThemes.com.

FusionDrupalThemes.com offers free and premium Drupal themes, as well as yearly Fusion Pro support subscriptions. The site makes extensive use of Ubercart and Panels to create these features:

Dashboards for site users, showing their forum posts, subscriptions, purchases, etc.
Streamlined checkout process focused on improving conversion rates.
An automated theme packaging system built by 3281d.
An on-site customer ticket system with complex privacy functionality.

Notable pieces of Drupal functionality built with the GVS team include:

Custom Panels panes that allow site builders to customize product and user profile pages without writing code.
A customized documentation system that combines ApacheSolr weighting and faceting for automated content presentation, along with the Nodequeue and Smartqueue Taxonomy modules for a more customized .
Performance tuning and optimization.
Customized discount rules made possible by enhancements to Ubercart's discount functionality.
Node access wrangling.

The Fusion site has a complex combination of node access requirements, including:

Premium subscriber-only support forums.
Certain users can mark their posts as 'private' to themselves and administrators.
File downloads accessible only by users who have purchased it.

Drupal site builders know that getting multiple node access modules to work together, especially on the same content type, can be tricky. The Fusion site successfully combines the following node access modules:

Private
Organic Groups
Forum Access
ACL
access_private

For more implementation details, read the excellent FusionDrupalThemes.com case study on Drupal.org.

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Twomile Information Services

evelyn — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 20:25:43 +0000

Among their services, Twomile Information Services provides a web service which translates addresses to Latitude/Longitude data. In order to use this service with the Drupal content management system, there needed to be a way to store address data and also the Latitude/Longitude data. There are several means to store addresses, but at the time this work was undertaken there was no simple project for Latitude/Longitude. So, the project involved two steps:

Creation of a simple CCK Latitude/Longitude module
Creation of a second module to tie together the CCK Address module, the new CCK Lat/Lon module, and the Twomile address lookup XMLRPC based web service.

The modules have been completed and the service module is currently only in use by beta testers of the service. When the service is more broadly available the module will be published for general use.

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Top Notch Themes

evelyn — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 01:10:24 +0000

Not Your Typical Drupal Support Client

Many support clients are end users of Drupal - they need help with the menu system, and knowing what the heck nodes are.

As the creators of some of the best commercial Drupal themes (and some great free themes as well), TopNotchThemes needs more than basic Drupal support. We've helped them improve their development infrastructure and workflow to make the process of developing great Drupal themes more efficient, and to also enable some upcoming internal and client-facing features. This lets them focus on building great designs for their themes.

Chris Fassnacht was kind enough to say this about working with us:

"GVS has been a valuable addition to our team. It's a relief to have a team of experts we can rely on to keep our Drupal-based infrastructure running smoothly!"

At Drupalcon Steph thanked us with a hug. What more can you ask for from a client?

TopNotchThemes Supports the Drupal Theme Community

In addition to being providers of great themes and a good customer they are also a company that "gets it." Their community involvement speaks for itself (one highlight is this Ubercart theming thread). They are happy to pay for our time knowing that we are working to keep the modules used on their sites well maintained (see Alternative Price and Moneris).

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