I am fairly new to the Drupal community having moved to Canada 2 years ago and retraining in Web Development with no previous experience. I took a diploma course at VSBT and fell in love with Drupal. The community approach to Drupal is the thing I like the most and the way it is so configurable - I like being able to tell clients that "anything is possible"

For the past year or so I have been developing sites for VSBT's sister company North Studio and subcontracting under my business of Ice Shadow Studio. Every opportunity I get I like to try new things with Drupal and learn more. I now develop all my sites in Drupal and it was a natural choice for my new business project.

Flight Crew Finder is my new business venture and I built the site alone in just 3 weeks. I say alone but I did have some help from a very talented programmer in customising the Job module - the only real customisation on the site. Just 2 months since launch and we are going strong. Over 1000 registered users and the first crew being called for interview.

The Issue

The Aviation Industry has notoriously been really bad for finding jobs and currently it is one of the most depressed job markets in the World. The industry has always relied heavily on personal networking skills and in the current recession this has seen newly qualified pilots left wondering where to turn. My business partner is an experienced private jet Captain with all the networking contacts so late 2009 we decided to set up this site to try and break the old networking habits and move more to social networking.

www.flightcrewfinder.com is built in Drupal 6 with contrib modules and it brings together elements of social networking with relevant news items, recommendation, resources and jobs to provide everything that someone in the aviation industry needs to find a job.

We have linked in with other social networking sites and all our forum, blog, news, articles, jobs etc get posted directly to twitter while we keep our fans updated on Facebook and LinkedIn. I have been really impressed with how well the twitter module works. I have set it up so that forum posts, blog, news and articles automatically get posted to twitter. I have then set up a rule for new companies and jobs where it will post to twitter once certain conditions have been met. Users are able to use the #tag input format and the integration is so seamless you don't even realise its going on.

For Facebook and LinkedIn it is more of a manual process but they both drive a lot of traffic our way. Facebook especially brings a lot of people our way and I my next item on the agenda is to begin using the Gigya Socialize Module.

The Basics

The site is hosted with Blue Host. It is a shared hosting package that has worked really well so far and their support has been fantastic. I did need to upload a php.ini to solve the low memory limit though which is always one to watch out for. Eventually we will be moving to a dedicated server but for initial purposes Blue Host has been great.

Challenges

There are many different views depending on the users role and there were some real challenges that I encountered when building the site:

  • General Public - can view news, forums, blog etc but get limited information on employers, jobs and crew
  • Employers - full view of crew, post jobs and receive applications directly whilst choosing whether or not they can be found (some choose to "headhunt" the crew they need and not be listed)
  • Crew - full job and employer listings, the ability to apply for jobs and create profiles for employers to search whilst keeping some elements of the profile private if the so wish (name, photo etc)
  • All Applications and CVs protected but have crew profiles search-able
  • The ability for all crew and employers to contact each other privately

The main problem with those items is that the core search did not respect any permissions and the only way round this that I could find was to use the Node Access Module with Search Lucene. The Node Access module did give me some issues with duplicate content although I now see from the issue queue that this may be a views issue.

The Design

I spent a lot of time theming and even themed the node edit forms - I wanted the site to appear visually appealing and different from most and I think that has been achieved. As a base theme I used Layout Studio. It is a great theme to work with and is highly configurable and needs very little (if any) "tweaking". I use it on all my sites.

Good Bits

So Node Access Module with Search Lucene solved all my problems and then it was onto the fun stuff. I had some real fun using modules that I had either never used before or ones I hadn't used in the way I used them - here are my favourites:

  • Views Slideshow and Quick Tabs - I was amazed that I could use the two together on the home page
  • Job Module - provided some great "out of the box" functionality that we "tweaked" to get it working how we wanted
  • CCK 3 - I know I know - a risk on a production site but i really wanted the "multigroup" functionality for resumes and type ratings. it works fantastically and I can't wait until there is a stable release.
  • Radioactivity - I really like being able to sort things by their "hotness"
  • Flag - for bookmarks, saving favourite crew, saving favourite employers etc
  • Twitter - great integration with rules and views
  • Views Attach - I love that I can attach a slideshow into the node content - see http://www.flightcrewfinder.com/cool-stuff/software/log-ten-pro

Of course there are the all the old favourites that I couldn't live without - views, rules etc but I really enjoyed using the ones above.

In Summary

Drupal has been a great platform for this venture. The contrib modules are just fantastic and it is so nice that you don't need to come from a programming background to develop great Drupal sites. In just over 2 months Flight Crew Finder has been extremely successful and I intend to continue building our success (Drupal Rocks).

Comments

bolaowoade’s picture

For someone new to drupal, i think this site is briliant. And the fact that you built it in only three weeks is awesome. Obviously you do have some very strong web design skills.

karensmallwood’s picture

:-)