We’re just wrapping up a big development push on aussiepd.com, the Drupal-based web site we built for Australian United States Services in Education last year. The site was upgraded to Drupal 6, and enhanced to allow on-site payment for AUSSIE event registrations. While we were at it, we moved the site to a new Virtual Private Server hosting account to provide better performance than the old shared hosting.

Background

AUSSIE has hosted workshops, conferences, and professional development sessions for the educational consulting community for years. In the past, they’d always used separate web sites and services to store the event data and allow users to register and pay for these events (lately they’d managed events at eventbrite.com). With AUSSIE’s site running Drupal, it was clear we should find a way for event data, registrations and payments to all be handled internally so that we could present everything under the AUSSIE brand, provide users a more compelling and less confusing experience, and ease the burden on site administrators. The new aussiepd.com does just that: consolidating all of this functionality into AUSSIE’s web site, with the PayPal API used for seamless integration of payment transactions.

How we did it

To achieve this, we started with a couple of Drupal powerhouse contributed modules: Ubercart for ecommerce, and Signup for event registrations. The missing link was provided by Signup Integration for Ubercart (aka UC_Signup), a custom module developed for this project by Ezra Gildesgame and the Growing Venture Solutions team. UC_Signup ties the registration and payment steps together into one smooth process for site users.

GVS put a lot of work into the module, including usability testing at their office in Denver, while I oversaw the general project, Drupal 6 upgrade, and hosting migration. It was great to work with Ezra to address AUSSIE’s needs, while giving our work back to the Drupal community.

Other goodies at the enhanced site include automated event location mapping thanks to the Location module, locally hosted videos thanks to the Blue Droplet Video module, and all of the standard administrative, usability, performance and security improvements of Drupal 6.

See for yourself

Have a look at the new aussiepd.com, and if you’re involved in education, watch for upcoming AUSSIE events in your field!

We’re thrilled to continue supporting AUSSIE as they build their online presence, demand more from their web site, and use it in the service of the educational community.