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By vrwired on
Gomster Inc. provides a channel for administrators of sports camps across the USA and Canada to publish and easily manage their website. Gomster allows any sports camps' domain name to be added and managed from the main, single install of Drupal on Gomster's server. Each domain name is a standalone web site with its own WWW URL and database. All websites share common features (modules) and similar styles (themes) with simplified and intuitive backend management via the Drupal CMS.
Why Drupal was chosen:
To enable a multi-site environment where standalone URLS could load their own entity's content utilizing one management system with the various roles of power from the Gomster backend administration, the choice was clear to use Drupal. Not only is this setup relatively easy to maintain from a developer's role, but easy to manage from a corporate role, and further, intuitively easy to manage from a sports camp website administrator's role. The scalability and flexibility of Drupal is second to none for a vast number of reasons including its core featured modules, Drush (utility via UNIX shell), and of course, all the contributed modules that make it so flexible, and last but not least, its vast community of open source contributors and support forums.
Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome):
The ultimate goal of this project was to build a platform that would be intuitively understood and managed by the lowest common denominator of business owners with very limited technical knowledge of building a website. The platform would require ability to have the owner's website stand alone and load as their unique www domain, but also have the ability for each owner to edit their own content in a powerful way using a shared management system to make their site unique.
Other requirements included:
Goal: We needed to be able to add new web sites ready to begin content editing on the same day of sale.
Outcome: I developed a procedure to enable a new site ready to begin editing, complete with auto-scheduled backups and it requires just 15 to 20 minutes to fully deploy.
Goal: We needed the ability to add all forms of media including maps, facebook/twitter, video, galleries, PDF docs, flexible custom menus, and mastheads - all from a simple backend UI that virtually anyone could understand how to work.
Outcome: I was able to implement all of the media needs thanks to the contributed media and admin modules and really hit the ball out of the park for making a very intuitive way to add all of this media by implementing a set of WYSIWYG modules.
Goal: The timeline to get this done was also tight. I had a month.
Outcome: I was able to do it with Drupal to complete satisfaction within that aggressive time frame.
Technical specifications
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen:
Wysiwyg set: essential to providing a UI to non-techie web site builders so they could intuitively manage their site content.
Media: essential to delivering many of the required sets of media which integrated very well with the set of WYSIWYG modules I implemented.
Admin: key module to enable a toolbar that is easily hidden from view for web site builders to navigate the backend UI for managing their site.
Backup and Migrate: key module to perform automated backups for each web site.
Drush: excellent utility to manage UNIX backend tasks such as building out new sites to add to the single install of Drupal that they all operate from.
Dynamic background: useful module to allow websites to easily insert their own mastheads.
Masquerade: useful module to test roles and see/do what you expect of each of the roles.
Chique: powerful theme I found from MtT that sped up development for presenting content and allowing for flexible changes to make the site appear more unique.
Team members:
Project team:
Bob Rohrer (Drupal Architect/Site Builder - Roaring Enterprises, LLC)
Sectors:
Sports
Startups
