At the end of May we launched the Enhancement Courses web site for Editure, the sister site of Advancement Courses for Teachers (ACT), that also provides professional development and career advancement courses for educators.

Like ACT, the Enhancement Courses web site automates what was previously a painstaking manual data management and sales flow process for the company, and provides a streamlined and searchable interface for educators to find the courses they want quickly. The site is powered by Drupal, Ubercart, Features, and a slew of other community-contributed code, with graphic design from Editure, and our architecture, development and theming tying it all together.

We worked closely with Editure to ensure that both the ACT and Enhancement Courses sites facilitated the new workflow they wanted, and we worked quickly to be sure the sites were ready to go for their busy summer season.

Like ACT, the new Enhancement Courses web site hit the ground running, and sales are humming along smoothly!

Greg and I have been working hard with Editure (parent company of AUSSIE) on a couple of new web sites. Last week, we launched the new Advancement Courses for Teachers (ACT) web site at www.actprogram.info.

ACT provides courses that educators can enroll in for professional development and career advancement. The old ACT site was maintained with a painstaking process of manual data entry and order processing. The new Drupal-powered site accepts online payments via the Ubercart ecommerce package and PayPal. And of course, ACT editors now have all of the data entry power of Drupal at their fingertips, simplifying their day-to-day work on the site immensely.

Graphic design for the site was provided by Editure, while Greg and I provided the site architecture and development. We also took this opportunity to overhaul our Drupal deployment process with some custom modules and better use of the community-contributed Features module.

The ACT site was built on the new infrastructure we’ve been building out for Editure, which features multiple secured web sites running in a Drupal multi-site setup, on a customized Debian Linux server. Look for posts about our smarter Drupal deployment process, and the launch of the ACT sister web site coming up soon!

We’re very excited to have just helped the International Women’s Health Coalition launch their Young Visionaries campaign! Young Visionaries is a contest designed to help youth who are inspired by human rights and women’s health share their visions for change, and win grants to continue their work. The general public can vote for their favorite visionaries, with final awards decided by IWHC’s panel of guest judges.

Young Visionaries is built on top of Akimbo, the WordPress-powered main IWHC blog. The nomination form allows youth to describe their vision, upload a photo, embed a video, and link to their web site or online profile. We’re using the herculean TDO Mini Forms plugin to provide a usable interface for submission of the nomination form, the Vote It Up plugin for the voting, the Vipers Video Quicktags plugin for handling of the videos, and the Cycle Lite jQuery plugin for the front page slideshow.

On the front end, the application ties in to the impressive Thesis theme already used by Akimbo, functioning essentially as a sub-theme for that section of the site. We used Thesis’ extensive customization and hook structure for most of the Young Visionaries sub-theme, though we did have to modify a couple of core Thesis files to facilitate the sub-theme. Tying it all together is our own custom logic and “glue code”, and theme files specific to Young Visionaries.

A diverse group of Young Visionaries have already been nominated! Have a look and vote for your favorite, or maybe even encourage someone you know to nominate his/herself.

Check out the IWHC Young Visionaries web application on Akimbo!

We just launched threeintentions.com, a web site that will build a community around the idea of the mind / body / spirit connection. The site provides related resources and represents teachers working in the field.

Three Intentions is organized by Brooke Warner, based in Berkeley, who Bad Feather and I worked with closely from conception and initial sketches, to branding and site mocks, to execution in WordPress. The site provides profile information, a blog platform, and event organization for Brooke and the Three Intentions teachers, whose numbers will be growing as the site gains traction.

Take a break from your daily grind to stop by threeintentions.com, and be sure to let Brooke know that Dtek and Bad Feather sent you.

Digital School Solutions is a new child company of long-time Dtek client Aussie, focused specifically on the technological side of Aussie’s broader school professional development mission. According to DSS: “Digital School Solutions is committed to helping schools and districts re-think teaching and learning to transform themselves into vibrant 21st century learning communities.”

Just before the winter break, we helped DSS launch their new Drupal-powered web site. Under the hood, the site is very similar to Aussie’s site, functioning essentially as a Drupal multi-site (technical challenges of multi-sites with SSL using cPanel to be written up in a future blog post!).

Like Aussie’s site, the DSS site features the custom paid event registration system we helped Growing Venture Solutions develop, as well as audio and video content, blogging, fine-tuned user management, and all of Drupal’s standard content management goodness.

On the front-end, the DSS site was designed to match Aussie’s site, with the DSS logo and a modified color scheme. The front page sports a jQuery-based slideshow, editable by site administrators, rather than the Flash movie used on Aussie’s site. Numerous theme improvements and further Drupal 6 optimizations were made in the process.

Visit the new DSS site at digitalschoolsolutions.com, and stay tuned for more DSS and Aussie news.