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.

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.

We recently completed a massive web site project for Australian United States Services in Education, or AUSSIE for short. AUSSIE is a New York based educational consulting company, with hundreds of consultants providing professional development services to schools around the country. AUSSIE’s old web site was a poor reflection of their forward-thinking and technologically-savvy work, so they hired us to help them build a new one.

The new site is powered by Drupal, our favorite content management platform, so AUSSIE has the power to do all of the day-to-day content and site management on their own. The site features blogs that will be available to all of their consultants, including audio and video content that will be streamed from the site and available in podcast form. The site uses SSL to encrypt the transfer of sensitive information like passwords, and ties in to AUSSIE’s event management service at eventbrite.com and PayPal account to handle online sales of their Teaching Comprehension CD ROM. Generally, the site provides AUSSIE the tools to meaningfully engage their huge educational community online.

On the the “front end” of the site, we worked with the graphic design supplied by an in-house designer to build a custom Drupal theme. The theme provides an engaging, attractive, and easy-to-use interface to the site, and of course it features code that’s semantic, valid, and optimized for search engines!

Lastly, importantly, we are providing thorough documentation and ongoing consultation to AUSSIE on how to use the site. We are excited to continue working with AUSSIE, both here at Dtek and at The Media Spot, where we are consulting with them on classroom technology integration. Check out the new aussiepd.com!

The title says it all… This is not our usual subject matter, but along with friend and colleague Daniel Kahn Gillmor we just completed an exciting ecommerce web site project for Billy and Carol Schurr, independent musicians in Tucson, Arizona. The site offers sheet music of Billy Schurr’s original compositions for sale and for preview via watermarked score files and corresponding mp3s.

Technically, the project involved custom database design, and integration with PayPal’s real-time payment services including Instant Payment Notification.

Even if you don’t have an angry congregation demanding music this instant, have a look at churchmusicondemand.com, and let them know Dtek sent you.