blogs

Project Brief -- Drupal Integrated into Microsoft Architecture

The American Productivity and Quality Center (APQC) is a member-based, non-profit organization that provides businesses with resources on process and performance improvement with a focus on knowledge sharing and best practice research. APQC's web site is where members go for documentation, the online library, surveys, and more.

APQC is launching a new site this year, and Drupal is one of several systems playing a role. Drupal will handle content and user management, eCommerce (via Ubercart), and social features.

Achieve's role in the project has been to customize Drupal and ensure that it can scale, perform, and integrate into the overall infrastructure. With launch imminent, we wanted to post about some of the Drupal integration details, and promise to share more information when the site goes live.

Last week, San Francisco-based Bella Pictures launched a new Drupal site that allows couples to select, schedule, and pay for wedding photographers online, greatly reducing one of the major hassles of wedding planning. With a network of certified photographers throughout the US, Bella is now able to sell high quality, local services via the web while also centralizing and automating administrative tasks such as billing and scheduling.

BellaPictures.com’s launch is the culmination of a year plus “engagement” with Achieve Internet. The first project was a sister site called StudioBlue.com, which offered a limited set of products in a few geographic regions. When this proof-of-concept Drupal site (the rehearsal) was complete, we moved on to the flagship BellaPictures.com.

The notable technical challenges in this project related to: Ubercart modifications allowing for multiple product attributes and coupons; integration with SalesForce, Bella’s customer relationship management (CRM) platform; and integration with Authorize.net to support payment plans.

Bella Pictures is in the business of making people’s dreams come true. The San Francisco-based company has transformed the wedding photography industry through its innovative direct-to-consumer, “white label” and traditional retail Web sites. But that wasn’t always the case.

While Bella was founded by a team of professionals with backgrounds in photojournalism, e-commerce and marketing, its Web site was originally intended to generate leads for a national network of photographers, not to sell. “The main marketing site was hand-crafted php,” recalls Steve Morgan, Bella’s chief technology officer. “We’d outsourced with other partners and used a number of different applications to develop it. As a result, it was all over the map.”

Before tackling its main Web site revise, Bella decided to launch Studio Blue – a new, direct-to-consumer site that offers wedding photography for under $1,000 – in June 2009. With the desire to explore ecommerce, but lacking an open-source content management system to do it, Bella turned to Achieve Internet to create a dynamic Drupal-based site.

We’ve been working for a while with Bella Pictures to develop a new wedding photography Drupal site, and it went live Tuesday 3/30. Visit at www.bellapictures.com. The site allows couples to select, schedule, and pay for wedding photographers online, greatly reducing one of the major hassles of wedding planning. And with a network of certified photographers throughout the US, Bella is able to sell high quality, local services via the web while also centralizing and automating administrative tasks such as billing and scheduling. Achieve Internet’s work on the site was focused mainly on architecture design, integration services, and custom Drupal development.

Given the viral nature of the web, small-scale visitor-swarms can quickly become enormous and overwhelming. It's kind of like the the videos you see during Shark Week on Discovery Channel – a little Facebook and Twitter chum in the water and presto: feeding frenzy! You want to be the guy in the steel cage when that happens.

This frenzy phenomenon occurs in a wide range of industries. Media sites were taxed immediately after the Haiti earthquake; sports sites recorded high traffic when Tiger Woods made a public apology; Woot.com always feels the pressure during a Woot-off (if you don't know what this is, I'm not at liberty to discuss it); public service sites are tested after heavy weather and other natural disasters.

Like many in the Drupal community I'm anxiously awaiting the new Drupal.org redesign. So much so, several months ago I jumped at the chance to contribute on the development team. We're making significant progress, and have a sprint scheduled for March 19th, 8am – noon PST (IRC channel #drupal-infrastructure).

The second annual SANDcamp (San Diego Drupal Camp http://sandcamp.org/) was January 23rd and 24th. The non-conference was a great success, with over 200 Drupalers in attendance. The new location at Balboa Park’s Hall of Champion was a dramatic improvement over last year and the organizing team http://sandcamp.org/information/event-organizers did an outstanding job. If you missed this year’s event, SANDcamp 2011 will be January 29th and 30th. The plan is to have the camp the week before the Superbowl every year, so plan your decade out now.

SANDCamp was this past weekend, and I had the pleasure of being able to present. The first half of the presentation was geared at improvements that can be utilized by small sites (app/db on the same server) to improve performance and increase capacity.

Attachment: 

ScalingPresentation.ppt

After years of outstanding BADCamps in the Bay Area the big dance is finally coming to the West Coast. Drupalcon SF will be held at the Moscone Center on April 19th through the 21st. If you have never been to a Drupalcon this is a perfect time to go. Hotel and airfare are very reasonable and the Moscone Center is a spectacular venue.

We have recently had a number of projects involving some form of multi-site installation.  It is interesting to note that multi-site in most cases is different for each client.  For instance, we have a credit bureau client that uses multi-site to offer their Fortune 500 banking clients access to credit score and history data on some 3 million businesses.  They do this through a Drupal front end that integrates with a custom Web Service to provide accurate credit information on their banking clients.