Growing Venture Solutions - GVS - Module Development

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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Power Shift 2011 Conference

Ezra — Fri, 27 May 2011 20:41:59 +0000

The Power Shift conference helps to increase awareness and action on climate change issues among college students.

The 2011 Power Shift conference site was built on the Conference Organizing Distribution (COD). GVS enhanced the checkout functionality to allow one member from an organization to purchase a coupon code that can be redeemed for conference registration by other organization members.

GVS also developed a customized conference registration workflow that reduces the number of fields on the user registration form, while making sure mandatory conference information fields (like emergency contact information) are filled out during conference registration. These customizations to the registration workflow powered over 10,000 conference registrations.

Advomatic brought on GVS to develop the registration components, and the site has resulted in ongoing code contributions back to COD through enhancements to the uc_signup module, including a registration process that is more customizable through configuration, as well as enhancements to the uc_coupon module.

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Harvard Magazine

Ezra — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 02:44:26 +0000

Harvard Magazine needed an ecommerce solution for selling text advertisements that vary in price according to the content of the text. GVS built an Ubercart payment gateway to support the CyberSource Hosted Order Page API, allowing Harvard to process payments offsite. GVS contributed the payment gateway back to the Ubercart core project, as well as enhancements to the UC_Node_Checkout module that was used to sell the customized advertisements.

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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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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."

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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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KIPP Colorado

evelyn — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 03:30:17 +0000

The Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) is a network of free open-enrollment college preparatory public schools in under-resourced communities throughout the United States. Today there are 82 KIPP schools in 19 states and the District of Columbia serving over 20,000 students. KIPP Colorado has two schools in Colorado with more planned for the future. With their growth and success came the need for a new website to further raise awareness of their mission.

With a beautiful new design in hand from Bainbridge Studios, KIPP needed a Drupal shop to bring it to life. We created the Drupal theme and configured several features, including a rotating photo block on the home page, a newsletter sign up box and an event calendar. We were conscious of setting up the site so that as KIPP opens more schools in the future it will be a simple matter for them to add new pages for those schools.

After the site launched, KIPP sent us this happy news:
"We are thrilled with the site and have already received several online donations as a result of the email that was sent announcing its launch! Thanks so much!"

We have also written an in-depth case study of the KIPP Colorado site.

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Lollishops

evelyn — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 01:28:06 +0000

We helped out with the development of a pretty neat multiple vendor e-commerce website. In working on it much of the code was custom but we were able to build a novel, generic per user content type quota system. Each user can purchase credits towards their quota, which allows them to submit new content.

About LolliShops - Multi Shop Marketplace

The easiest way to describe LolliShops is an upscale boutique version of Etsy, built in Drupal. Lollishops provides a turnkey solution for artistic individuals who make jewelry, clothing and art by hand. Anyone can sign up and setup a personalized online store in minutes. It focuses on the Frou Frou market (if you're not familiar with it, it's probably best described by the site). So far, LolliShops has thousands of individual stores. The theme and products shown on the home page give a great sense of the intended audience. Vendors on the site purchase the ability to sell their products on the site with 3 different selling arrangements. Two of these arrangements limit the number of products that they can create, requiring a quota system.

About the User Quota Module

Of course the first thing we did when looking to build that quota functionality was to compare all of the existing solutions. We posted a summary of our research into the Duplicate Modules Hall of Shame group for others to benefit from the research. It seemed like there was no way to do exactly what we need with the existing modules, so we set to work building a new module.

The result is the User Quota module. Currently the module is very simple. It provides two administrative screens: 1 to list all of the users with their current quotas and a second to manage the quota for a specific user.

Why bother announcing it here? To limit confusion in an already crowded area I used the project page from an old module. Doug Muth graciously agreed to let us use the old User Quota project page. Thanks, Doug!

Feature Enhancement - Easy Quota Purchases

One sad point with this module is that the Paypal integration we did for Lollishops was very site specific and cannot be directly committed and used on other sites. We are looking for sponsors to help build a simple e-commerce integration. We are debating about whether to integrate with Ubercart, or LM Paypal, or Simple Paypal Framework. Certainly in time it should provide both of these features. The real question is which to do first. Ubercart appears to have the most solid 6.x release but doesn't fit with the lightweight nature of the module.

And of course there is a need to fund that work. If you have a site that could use the ability to sell a node, please contact us so we can discuss the exact implementation.

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AUSSIE (Australian United States Services in Education)

evelyn — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 00:56:44 +0000

AUSSIE provides professional development workshops to over 400 schools, and wanted to collect attendee information and fees on their Drupal site without relying on the external Eventbrite service. GVS integrated Ubercart, Drupal's cornerstone E-commerce system, with Signup, the premiere Events registration module. The resulting UC_Signup module, makes it easy for attendees to register for events and pay registration fees.

With different combinations of attendees and events, events registration can be complicated for end-users and site administrators. So far, hundreds of sites have switched to uc_signup for its smooth registration workflow and easy setup.

GVS also conducted usability testing on UC_Signup, resulting in several issues that were submitted to the Ubercart project.

As part of ongoing support work, GVS has provided enhancements to Ubercart's discount functionality.

This project was completed in partnership with Dtek Digital Media.

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