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.

The Pratt Center for Community Development works for a vibrant, livable, and sustainable New York City. We’ve been working with them for five years, on everything from deploying multiple web sites and blogs, to consulting on various online services, to producing web site content. As we’ve worked together, the Pratt Center has begun to seize the potential of online publishing and promotion. They’ve been demanding more from their online tools, and it was becoming inefficient and costly to rely on us to manage their content.

Well last month we helped the Pratt Center take the biggest leap forward in the organization’s online history when we launched their new Drupal-powered web site at prattcenter.net.

The new site sports standard Drupal goodies like multiple types of content, arbitrary groupings of content with separate RSS feeds, and a powerful interface for administering the site. We also developed many custom content types and fields that fit the Pratt Center’s specific needs, using some rockstar modules contributed by the Drupal community, like FileField, Imagecache, and Embedded Media Field.

We tied it all together with a custom theme built around the Pratt Center’s branding, custom menus, whatever content listings we could dream up thanks to Views, and CCK node and user references.

All told, the Pratt Center now has an incredibly powerful platform for managing their own online presence and publicizing the great work they do. All of the day to day content management is in their hands, with many site features handled automatically by Drupal.

This allows us to serve the Pratt Center much more efficiently: we’re in a more administrative and consultative capacity, applying software updates, supporting their usage of the site, and helping them make architecture and policy decisions about this amazing technical platform at their fingertips.

PrattCenter.net now runs on Drupal.

Many of the folks we work with want to display video on their web sites. Hosting video on their own web servers has some obvious advantages in terms of control, but is often too resource-intensive and expensive. That’s when existing video hosting providers come into play.

Unfortunately, this is a great example of where it’s easy to follow the trends without considering some of the bigger implications, like the way our content is licensed, whether we want X company to profit off of our content, and generally what type of network we want to build as a community.

A friend recently pointed us to a post on wordpress.com entitled: Owned? Legal terms of video hosting services compared. It’s a great starting point for considering the privacy/licensing, ownership, and legal complaint recourse terms of the various big name video hosts out there.

Kudos to the article author, and here’s to all of us raising our collective awareness of these issues.

Last fall we mentioned that there were some geographic changes on the way, and here they are… As of this summer, I’ll be heading to the east coast and joining Rhys in Brooklyn!

For our Seattle-based coworkers, colleagues, and clients, I’m sorry we won’t be able to meet face to face too often anymore, but we don’t anticipate any other changes to our working relationship. If you have any concerns or questions about this move, please get in touch.

I’m excited to be joining physical forces with Rhys again after many years of living and working 2000 miles apart. It’ll be great to be geographically closer to some of our clients in New York, too.

This will mean some down time for me this summer — mostly during the month of June. We’ve already been discussing this with clients we’re actively working with. For anyone else who knows they’ll need work completed around that time, please let us know.

Wish me luck!

We built a simple web site for the New Mexico Rural Water Association (NMRWA) 5 years ago, and their tech-savvy staff has maintained the site content on their own ever since. The layout and code had started to show its age, though, so NMRWA recently hired us to revamp the site.

The new site is more responsive to the preferences of site visitors (it expands with the browser window, any modern browser can change the font sizes, etc), and is vastly improved under the hood (page semantics, accessibility, search-engine-optimization). The site integrates a phpBB-based forum, with simple theming to tie it in to the look and feel rest of the site.

NMRWA continues to maintain the site content, but now they’ve got a modern framework to build on! As always, we take it as the highest compliment that we’re able to maintain such long-term relationships with our clients.

Visit the new NMRWA site at nmrwa.org.