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 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.