iTravel Costa Rica - Social Travel Directory Case Study

i Travel Costa Rica is an interactive travel website originally created using Drupal 6 and upgraded to Drupal 7. It lists a wide variety of travel information including hotels, restaurants, tours, beaches, transportation, photo galleries, and more. Each section contains specific fields to include information and pictures, making it simple for anyone to post content. We also integrated Google maps to display the exact location of each listing. Administrative users are able to select the location on a map when creating or editing a listing. Drupal also allows for social interaction with comments, 5 star ratings, blogs, Facebook integration for login and share/like buttons, and additional social network sharing, and an "add to favorites" feature that lets a user create a list of their favorite hotels or other listings, and access it from their user profile. Each section is listed using the views module, and includes a featured listing at the top, and search filters to narrow your results. Taxonomy was used to categorize listings by their location and region, and a location menu was added for quick navigation. When viewing by location you can also filter by the type of listing to find exactly what you are looking for.

Home Page

The home page features a rotating banner created using the views carousel module. It is powered by Jquery, and unlike flash, it views even on mobile devices such as the iPhone. We created a content type specifically for the banner using the CCK (Content Construction Kit) and Image field modules to make it easy to update. The main content area containing the bulk of the text for the home page was created using tabs to fit more content into a smaller area. This keeps the site SEO friendly and content rich, without taking up too much space. The rest of the featured content blocks were created using views and displayed with the panels module for a very manageable home page.

Theme

The site uses a custom theme built as a Genesis sub theme. Genesis gives us all of the theme functionality and base to create a very dynamic theme, and decreases theme creation time. To stay in contact with our visitors we placed a fixed "Questions & Comments" tab to the left which opens a contact form into a lightbox. This was created using the webforms and colorbox modules, and some custom theming.

Publishing

To allow user collaboration a "claim or submit a listing" button was added to the header. This allows the owner of a listing to register on the website, and once approved, manage their listings and add new ones. The approval process is manual to verify true ownership, but once the user is verified they will have the freedom to manage their listing with no need for administrator approval. Also, each time a new comment or listing is posted, an email is sent to the administrator for monitoring and quality control.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Drupal is the perfect solution for a stable and scalable community website. It is easy to add and maintain our content, and also easy to add and upgrade modules for enhanced functionality. We know we can rely on Drupal core to be secure and updated as needed, and have been impressed with the maintainers of contributed modules as well. When we have questions or run into difficulties the community is always there to help, and constantly developing, improving, and moving Drupal forward.