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By Skvare on
The Texas Archeological Society (TAS) is an organization founded in 1929 that brings together Professional and Avocational Archeologists. As the organization grew, systems and process for managing the various functions of their organization became disjointed and required a lot of additional resources to keep them organized. To solve TAS’s challenges, Skvare created a new responsive website with Drupal 7 integrated with Drupal Commerce and CiviCRM. These tools help to provide a central place where the organization houses all of their information - membership data, meeting reports, event registration, and sales of their printed bulletins.
Why Drupal was chosen:
The organization’s previous website did not utilize any content management system and relied on hardcoded PHP files making it very difficult for website administrators to update the content. As the organization grew, systems and process for managing the various functions of their organization became disjointed and required a lot of additional resources to keep them organized. Online donations and membership dues were collecting payment information offsite at an Authorize.net page with no branding, registering for events required printing and mailing a completed form with payment, and the look and feel of the site was very outdated and difficult to navigate.
Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome):
Skvare created a new responsive website with Drupal 7 integrated with Drupal Commerce and CiviCRM. Drupal’s content management system allows content to be broken out into various content types with specific fields, which makes it easy for a website administrator to create/modify content. It also has built-in user roles and permissions feature which allows different types of users, such as TAS members, to have access to content that the general public cannot access. Drupal Commerce allows the organization to sell printed copies of their old bulletins dating all the way back to 1959. CiviCRM manages their memberships, online donations, event registrations, and email marketing. With the new system, they now have all of the organization’s data housed within the website that can be managed easily from employees/volunteers in the organization.
Technical specifications
Drupal version:
Drupal 7.x
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen:
CiviCRM
CiviCRM manages the organization’s memberships, online donations, event registrations, and email marketing.
CiviCRM Entity
TAS needed more flexibility with the layout and design of their event pages. This module allows us to combine the event information page with the registration page so users did not have to click a “Register” button to sign up for the event. Less clicks means a higher conversion rate! CiviCRM Entity allowed us to create tabs to house even more information related to the event. For example, nearby lodging, restaurants, recommended readings, and more.
Our CiviCRM Entity event registration form also has a custom field called “related member.” Users with a family or organization membership can added additional contacts to their membership via their my account page. After doing so, the related member field is populated with the additional contact’s names. Once selected the form is auto-populated with details from that member’s contact record. This makes registering additional participants for the event quick and easy for the end user!
Drupal Commerce
Drupal Commerce allows users to purchase printed bulletins that contain educational articles written by various archaeologists and other industry thought leaders.
Inline Entity Form
TAS’s bulletin products contain several articles written by different authors. To allow for Articles and Authors to be searchable, we created a new content type, Publication Articles, and added an Inline Entity Form field to our main product content type. When adding details about the individual volumes, TAS admins can enter the article details in the same form and the article details are stored as separate entities.
Views
Views were utilized in the BTAS (bulletin) store to list details of each volume available for purchase. Since we had separate entities for each article, this allowed us to expose filters that allow the user to search for an Article Title or Author of an article and return the volume that contains that article.
Community contributions:
Skvare is the active maintainer of CiviCRM Entity.
Organizations involved:
Sectors:
Education
