BusinessHelpingBusiness.com - 20 Hours and Under $20

Using Drupal 6.x, BusinessHelpingBusiness.com accelerates from concept to implementation in 20 hours and for under $20. BusinessHelpingBusiness.com was conceptualized on a Friday and launched the following Monday. This quick launch can be partly attributed to the breadth and depth of Drupal core and contributed modules as well as a very flexible and business-friendly theme from Acquia. iThinkWorks, the company behind BusinessHelpingBusiness.com, wants to share this success with the Drupal community as encouragement and learning.

Background

The idea for BusinessHelpingBusiness.com came about in an early morning dream. About the time when your head starts to work before your body wants to wake up, one iThinkWorks founder happened upon a thought for a simple service that helps businesses to help other businesses. BusinessHelpingBusiness.com was founded that morning on the simple principle that businesses can help other businesses to survive and succeed by making needs known and favors available. The idea is so simple yet so necessary. It is through cooperation, not competition, that businesses can grow together. This grassroots movement needed a grassroots platform and Drupal was the easy answer. iThinkWorks had several large-scale Drupal implementations under their belt including WISEOZ and this was the chance to demonstrate the use of Drupal for a simpler concept that required a quick turnaround.

20 Hours Effort

In just 20 hours of effort over a three day period, BusinessHelpingBusiness.com came to life. The concept required no user registration which greatly simplified configurations and permissions across core modules.

BusinessHelpingBusiness.com required a simple means for users to subscribe to an email list, The Needs & Haves List, for submitted needs and haves to be distributed on a regular basis. The Simplenews module was selected for this purpose. The Simplenews module was set up to allow users the ability to subscribe to the The Needs & Haves List through a block prominently placed in the header. As needs and haves are submitted by business owners, the Simplenews module is used to create and send The Needs & Haves List to subscribed users.

In order to collect the needs and haves from business owners, two web forms were needed: 1) I NEED and 2) I HAVE. The Webform module was used to create these two web forms which can be easily accessed from the home page.

Additional modules implemented within this short timeframe include Blog and Google Analytics.

Under $20

Open source is a wondrous thing when it comes to implementing a web site quickly and for very little cost. We paid just under $20 for the domain name and that's all we've spent so far. We were fortunate enough to already have several other sites running Drupal so adding this small one was just an extension of our existing platform. We've found the Drupal architecture to be highly extensible and scaleable for both small and large sites alike which made adding another Drupal site to our already existing server a flip of a switch.

Those who've graduated from the theming school of hard knocks realize how much time and money proper theming can take. With that said, a good free templated theme can be your best friend when trying to implement quickly while keeping costs low. We found our new best friend in the Acquia Marina theme which offers a sharp, clean professional business look along with a crazy number of regions. We were able to achieve the home page aesthetics you see using all available regions the theme comes with and several custom blocks.

Challenges

With limited features and a short turnaround time, we didn't have room for many challenges. Notable challenges that did occur as part of those 20 hours are:

• Too many options can be a bad thing ... The Acquia Marina theme was so flexible that we must have reworked the look of the home page about ten times before we finally settled on the look you see now.

• Test your web forms ... We were in such a rush that we failed to test the web forms we created before taking the site live. The very first form submitted was an I NEED form and it came through with no data! We quickly performed troubleshooting and fixed the problem by downgrading the module to the previous version.

Conclusion

Quick and inexpensive is possible with Drupal! Technical difficulties were minimized and we were able to to focus on the business implementation tasks and not worry so much about the technology. If you are a business that believes in helping other businesses, visit BusinessHelpingBusiness.com and get involved!