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By jbova on
The Highwood USA Drupal installation consists of three sites configured with domain access. These include an e-commerce site, and dealer locator, and an employment opportunity site. This allowed us to share a common theme and installation among all three.
The Highwood USA e-commerce web site, which sells various products made from faux wood, utilizes Drupal Commerce and various commerce modules. The Quick Tabs module allowed for placing several tabs on a product page, including an overview tab, and a related products tab that loads a view of related products referenced using the Entity Reference module.
https://shop.highwood-usa.com
The Highwood USA dealer locator site utilizes the Location, GMap, and Views modules to provide a proximity search and map view of dealer locations.
http://www2.highwood-usa.com
The Highwood USA employment opportunities site allows the company to add open positions to the web site. An employment application using the Webforms module is available to visitors to submit an application for employment. This site utilizes Entity References and the Entity Reference View widget module to allow employment applicants to view and select open employment positions during the application process. Highwood USA is notified using the Notifications module.
http://employment.highwood-usa.com
Why Drupal was chosen:
Drupal was chosen for this site due to the needs for e-commerce with a tightly integrated CMS. The second greatest reason was the features provided by the Domain Access module to create several different sites. We were able to use Drupal to create 3 different sites that would have otherwise required individual installations of an e-commerce platform and a content management system.
Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome):
There were three goals to meet with this project. The first was to create an e-commerce site. The second was to create a dealer locator. The third was to create an on-line employment opportunity and application site.
Requirements of the e-commerce site included tabs and lightbox style images on the product pages, related products views, accessory product views, and a user-friendly content management system.
Requirements of the dealer locator site included an interface for Highwood USA employees to manage open employment positions, and the ability for applicants to complete an on-line application.
Requirements of the dealer locator included integration with a mapping services, such as Google Maps, and the ability for Highwood USA to manage dealer locations.
Technical specifications
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen:
The Commerce Module for Drupal 7 is fantastic. As a long time user of Drupal 6 and Ubercart, we have also attempted e-commerce and content management on other platforms such as Magento or WordPress. As time allowed, these sites have all been converted to Drupal once we realized we outgrew the other implementations.
Most of the modules used are a standard install when we develop a new site. These modules have proven themselves time and again.
The Zen theme has great documentation. It offers just enough to get you started on a theme without needing to rip out code that will not work for your design.
Community contributions:
During the development of this project, we were looking for a way to list "Related Products" or "Accessories" to a product. This feature did not appear in Drupal Commerce. As such, we were able to implement this using the Views and Entity Reference modules. After getting the implementation working, I wrote a step by step guide to creating a Related Products feature which can be found here: http://drupal.org/node/1465920
Contributions were also made to the Location 7.x-4.x-dev module, but this seems to be sidelined in favor of continued stabilization of 7.x-3.x and the new 7.x-5.x versions.
Team members:
Project team:
James Bova
NerdyiT LLC
Kristin Rider
Graphic Designer
Sectors:
E-Commerce
