OoglieBooglie.com - A tee shirt design competition

About Needle Consulting

I was contacted by a local client here in Virginia Beach to build OoglieBooglie (http://www.oogliebooglie.com) . This project was my first freelance venture as a Drupal developer. Prior to OoglieBooglie, I was one of the core Drupal developers for The Virginian Pilot (http://www.pilotonline.com) -- one of the largest Drupal powered web sites in the US. I have recently formed Needle Consulting, where we offer Drupal services: everything from custom modules to Drupal optimization to custom themes ( email: principal@needleconsulting.com ).

What is OoglieBooglie?

OoglieBooglie.com is a place where artists and art lovers gather. Artists create designs that they think would look great printed on a T shirt. OoglieBooglie and the members vote for the designs they think are the best. Then, OoglieBooglie prints the design on T shirts and sells them on the site. The artist then gets paid $2 USD per shirt sold on the site for an entire year.

The Theme / Logo

The OoglieBooglie theme was developed by one of my business partners as a sub theme of Zen. The concept for the logo is the classic Halloween sheet ghost costume.

Some pages to check out

http://www.oogliebooglie.com/shirts/compassionate-buddha
http://www.oogliebooglie.com/view/members/artists
http://www.oogliebooglie.com/bysize
http://www.oogliebooglie.com/upload-your-design
http://www.oogliebooglie.com/users/toddricks (custom profile)

Highlighted Modules

In addition to the standard modules (CCK, Views, Imagecache, etc) below are some of the modules we used:

• AddToAny
• Admin Role
• LoginToboggan
• Nice Menu
• Tag Tool
• Watcher : added custom watcher icon
• Buddylist
• Vote Up/Down: customized vote widget
• User Import : prior to launch we had a registration site
• Simplenews : customized module to display various newsletters options based on user's role (ie. users who submit a design are elgible for the Artist Newsletter)
• Panels : mainly used on the custom profile page
• Avatar Blocks

Customization

A few of our highlights include:

• Go To Print Module : This module may either run from cron or manually via a link in the admin section of the site. A formula provided by the client determines the winning design. Once the winning design is selected various functions run that convert the node from being a "design submission" to a "product". Data from the OoglieBooglie Default Settings Tool are then used to populate various components required by Ubercart such as stock levels and price. In addition, an email is sent to users who opted in to the Winning Notification Alert on their profile page.
• OoglieBooglie Default Settings Tool : As mentioned above this tool allows the client to manage an array of options on OoglieBooglie such as T shirt price, stock levels, homepage text, number of days to go back to determine a winner, and default number of shirts that must be ordered from the printer.
• Utility : This module handles various hooks across the site (ie. random design display on the homepage, "More work by this artist" block, member/artist display page)

Ubercart

Since OoglieBooglie is an e-Commerce site we felt Ubercart was a natural fit. We used numerous add ons to Ubercart such as Addresses, Out of stock notificator, stock manager with attributes, Store Coupons and Flatrate. Luckily, Workflow-ng was there to save the day when it came to the shipping requirements.

Coupon Code

My client has created a coupon code for a free OoglieBooglie Lime shirt (http://www.oogliebooglie.com/shirts/oogliebooglie-lime). There are only 50 coupons remaining for this shirt. To use the code simply add this shirt to your shopping cart and enter NEEDLE as a coupon code during the check out process.

Conclusion

OoglieBooglie has been live for a little over two months now. Our client is always looking for new designs , so if you have a good idea for a T-shirt please join, download the design submission kit (http://www.oogliebooglie.com/design-submission-guidelines) , and submit your art. For those of you who are not artistic we'd love for you to cast your vote to help determine winning designs.

Many upgrades / new functionality are currently in the works so stay tuned.