Growing Venture Solutions - GVS - Support

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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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.

visit the site

San Jose Public Library

evelyn — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 21:27:20 +0000

The San Jose Library manages a variety of websites for San José Public Libraries and San José State University Library. After evaluating several systems, the web team decided to use Drupal for their projects and began working to learn to use Drupal. In order to speed their trip up the Drupal learning curve, they decided to engage Growing Venture Solutions for training.

About the training, team lead Sarah Houghton-Jan said:

"Greg's training was well-organized, starting with the basic and progressing to the more advanced topics. Greg is extremely knowledgable about every aspect of Drupal. As one of the community's most active members, he has an incredible range of information immediately at his disposal about the system's capabilities and processes. The training was extremely flexible - Greg let us stop and ask questions whenever we wanted, pause for hands-on work, and breeze through issues of less interest to us. Greg is a very friendly trainer, approachable, easy to work with, and amazingly knowledgable. I would recommend him for any institution seeking training on any aspect of Drupal. Though we had three days of training, I wish we had five instead so that we could have gone more in depth into each topic and access Greg's wealth of knowledge!"

The Library training was a blend of our standard training curriculum and some customization to fit their needs.

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M Squared Group

evelyn — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 21:09:28 +0000

The M Squared Group came to us with a freshly built site that needed some help. Their site was quickly falling out of date and key features that they needed were difficult to add.

Through our support plan, we helped integrate more of the site content into the homepage, provided a method for posting videos to the site, and have generally cleaned up the site to make sure their site runs efficiently. A large part of this engagement has involved educating the M Squared team about the ability of Drupal to empower them to make their own enhancements.

About M Squared Group

M Squared Group provides a variety of marketing services including Segmentation and Targeting and Customer Analysis. Located near Minneapolis, Minnesota they provide services to clients across the United States.

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Pikes Peak Library District

evelyn — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 20:56:58 +0000

In 2008, Pikes Peak Library District (PPLD) formed a team to completely replace its existing site with an ambitious Drupal-based implementation. The site is served in-house by PPLD and receives over one million visits per year. PPLD brought in Growing Venture solutions to provide high-level Drupal support and training.

At the outset of its involvement, GVS has squashed configuration bugs, developed strategies to implement the site design, optimized PPLD's webserver, and worked on Drupal Core issues affecting the site (including this bug fix in the Aggregator module). The site will include book recommendation features, advanced search, links to numerous online catalogs, and a complex editorial workflow.

As our participation in the project launched, PPLD Web Developer Virginia Franklyn had this to say on her blog:

"Steve and Greg helped us optimize our server, double checked our set-up, and gave suggestions on how to handle some of the more complicated tasks we are are trying to accomplish. I highly recommend them as consultants for anyone attempting to launch a Drupal website.

We look forward to continuing to support the Pikes Peak Library District.

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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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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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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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