Designer Handbag Enthusiasts Love Handbago.com, built on Drupal 6.

Developed with the handbag enthusiast in mind, Handbago.com launched an online community and catalog website that caters to handbag lovers everywhere. The site is built on Drupal 6 and features an extensive catalog of current, past and upcoming collections from world-renowned handbag designers as well as up-and-coming designers. Members can search handbags by type, color, price range, celebrity and designer. Handbago also provides users a wide range of content including designer handbags, handbag blog, celebrity handbags, handbag reviews, handbag search, handbag trends, fashion, events, sales and exclusive interviews.

The Handbago web site was developed by Helixium and showcases Drupals proven content structure for a publicshing and database driven web sites. The site grew out of a clear need to provide a centralized catalog for all designer handbags. As of now, handbags can only be found on stores (which have limited inventory), blogs (which do not have full catalog or product listings) and designers (which typically only feature their latest lines). Drupal was the platform of choice as its ability to easily create and associate a wide range of content (celebrities, designers, stylists, stores, etc) with handbags. Handbago also highlights the use of known modules to achieve a wide range of features.

View Screenshot of Handbago Homepage

Theming

The site utilizes the Endless XS theme built by WorthAPost. While there were several customizations made to the theme, the majority of the core theme was utilized. We developed a custom module that allowed us to override the background image and replace it with images for advertisers. These can either be full background images or tiled and can easily be changed through the admin area for new advertisers.

Front Page Slideshow

We utilized FrontPageSlideshow to provide the homepage slideshow that can help feature and direct traffic towards popular and new handbags on the site. We integrated it onto our site via the corresponding FrontPage Slideshow Module and besides a small glitch with the module that is incompatible with any caching, the overall effect has been wonderful.

Taxonomy / Content Types

The site is mainly built around content types and their associated categories. The content types we used are designers, handbags, celebrities, celebrity style, reviews and blogs.

View / Blocks / Panels

The site was built using Views, Blocks and Panels. Handbags, Celebrities and Designers content is all displayed with Views. Blocks were used to create several of the pages including Featured Handbags, Celebrity Style and Popular Celebrities. Panels were used to create the Featured Designer Handbags on the homepage.

Roles / Data Import

The Handabgo team has been working with designers and other sites to import handbags, designers and celeb sightings into the site. Handbago provided a dedicated role for Designers and VIP Designers so that they can edit their content on the site. While these are paid roles, the process of approving and assigning roles to designers is a manual process. The addition roles on the site are for Site Admins, Content Admins, Content Managers, Bloggers, and Stylists.

Social Media

To help promote Handbago via social media outlets like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn. We created a new content type called Social Media which included a title, image and URL. A block was then created to view the images uploaded for social media. These links go directly to their handbago pages and/or groups.

Hosting / Caching / Performace Enhancers

The site is hosted on Mosso and the servers were configured with Memcache API, APC Cache Router and Squid Cache. We also implemented the Boost module was also used to ensure improved server performace.

Advertising

Handbago chose to go with a single ad approach, which means there is only one 300x600 ad that appears on the site at any given time. It also correlates with the custom background module that was mentioned under the theme. We utilized the hosted OpenX Ad Server solution and have been pleased with its performance and capabilities to easily switch ads along with provide daily email reports of click throughs and impressions.

Module List

• Admin Role
• Administration Menu
• CCK
• Boost
• Chaos Tool Suite
• Custom Breadcrumbs
• ImageCache
• Simplenews
• FCK Editor
• LoginToboggan
• Open X
• PathAuto
• ShareThis
• SiteMap
• ThickBox
• Token
• Webform
• Panels
• Front Page Slideshow
• Google Analytics
• FiveStar
• Views

Handbago officially launched on August 4, 2009. Read the Handbago PR Newswire Release. We are always looking for feedback or comments on the site along with any ways it could be improved. If you have anything you'd like to share, please let us know.

Case Study written by Brian Meert, Helixium