Unique Community and Online Store - Case Study

Dubkorps is an online community for European car enthusiasts. It's got a military style to it and is accompanied by a clothing and accessories product line.

Problems to Overcome

Site Accessibility

Prior to the Drupal iteration, the site was a large Flash site with links to paypal for purchasing products. It was impossible to link to a product, find things quickly, and very slow to load (the swf file being almost 1mb). Search engines also had no way to index the content.

Order Management

The largest problem with using paypal for order management is the general lack of features and information. Ubercart solves all of these problems. Because the 6.x version of Ubercart is still in beta at the time the site was being developed, Drupal 5.x was the only solution. The owners wanted to charge people for shipping, especially international orders, have an affiliate program, be able to track inventory easily, and most importantly: be able to track their orders! Ubercart can do all of these things with very little configuration.

vBulletin Integration

Amongst the capabilities of the site is the need to upgrade an account in the vBulletin forum based on a purchase made. On the site this is referred to as "Enlistment." This was ultimately accomplished with custom PHP in the Workflow module and Ubercart's conditions and actions.

Current Infrastructure and a More Affordable Platform

The current website is hosted on a Windows environment which can be a challenge for Drupal as many people know. The end goal is to move the site to a more affordable, stable, and faster linux host in the future. Existing technologies in use, such as ColdFusion, had to be removed first. By moving all of the technology PHP and MySQL based solutions, moving is easy and many hosts meet the requirements.

Constant Change and New Features

Dubkorps is always changing. In less than a year they've added many features and are going to add more. Drupal allows us to provide the flexibility to continue changing.

Development

Development took 3 months in my nights and weekends. Custom development included create the theme and configuring the modules (mostly Ubercart and Views). No new modules were developed for this site.

Challanges and Lesson's Learned

The first major challenge was translating the design from a PSD file given to me by the designer to a Drupal 5.x template. Besides Page and Node tpl.php files, only Node-Product.tpl.php is used. This page completely rewrites the node output, floating an embedded view of products left and the product itself right. Making this page look like the PSD files was the largest challenge in the whole project. Embedding views worked the best because Blocks don't have paging.

Results

In only a week online, the site had already handled many orders and received rave reviews from fans and members of the forum. Order tracking, shipping quotes, affiliates, and inventory are all working as well. The client is happy with the solution, usability, and increased marketability.