Growing Venture Solutions - GVS - Site Architecture

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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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.

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Certified to Rock

lisa — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 16:33:31 +0000

CertifiedToRock.com was created to allow community members and employers to get a sense of someone's involvement with the Drupal project.

Certified to Rock (aka CTR) uses a custom algorithm that gathers publicly available information from drupal.org, which is then distilled into a score on a scale from 1 to 11. The algorithm produces scores for site builders, developers, documentation writers, themers and anyone else who is active on drupal.org. We've also designed the algorithm to consider how successful the person is at engaging with the Drupal project.

The only barrier to entry is involvement on drupal.org: once you have a computer and internet connection, you can start contributing work that will increase your CTR score: patches, code reviews, documentation, modules, themes and support.

Why Certified to Rock works

CTR scores don't get stale. As long as one's participation continues, their score will eventually go higher.
Unlike other certification programs, CertifiedToRock.com's scoring is free and doesn't require any time commitment beyond normal interaction with the Drupal project.
Someone with a higher score is more likely to be respected within the community, and this usually means they are more likely to get assistance from the Drupal community via IRC or issue queues when they need it.

The implementation

Ben developed the code, Evelyn worked on the design and Carl implemented the custom theme. CTR was built in early 2010 on a Drupal 7 alpha release.

Updating Certified To Rock

As the project matures, we are developing more frequent score updates and adding new individuals.

Another area that has required some iterative improvement is the secret algorithm used to calculate scores.

What people are saying

The GVS team loved this:

Several people are proudly displaying their CTR presence on their personal sites or drupal.org profiles.

Companies such as Lullabot and Grammys.com are asking job applicants for their CTR score, if they have one. We think it's great that a CTR score can help support a job application, but not guarantee a job nor exclude anyone.

More information

About Certified to Rock For Drupal

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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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Arapahoe Community College

evelyn — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 00:40:46 +0000

Arapahoe Community College (ACC) website had been designed and maintained in Dreamweaver for years before undergoing a major redesign and redevelopment in 2009. The new design created a consistent look-and-feel throughout the site and integrated more imagery on key pages.

ACC and the designers determined that using a CMS would be the best way to maintain the site in the future for the sake of better aesthetic consistency and delegation of content authoring. Growing Venture Solutions was hired to help build the new website in Drupal and provide training and support for the College staff.

GVS worked closely with ACC's staff to carefully develop content moderation practices that would allow many different authors to participate with migrating content from the old site and easily integrate images into the specific page templates. In a matter of a few weeks, the staff added over 1000 pages of content.

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University Corporation for Atmospheric Research

evelyn — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 21:23:31 +0000

The University Center for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) in Boulder has adopted Drupal as an organization-wide standard for deploying websites. One of the intranet sites UCAR needed was a system for managing the tutorials and FAQs that help administrative employees navigate through the center's guidelines, processes and procedures.

Growing Venture Solutions worked with stakeholders from across the organization to design a knowledge management system to reduce the work for administrators and to improve access to relevant information. GVS also trained in-house web developers and designed an efficient workflow for transferring existing content into the new Drupal site.

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