The new website for The Buying Exchange has been relaunched using Drupal 6.
The Buying Exchange was originally developed in the early days of Drupal 5 to negotiate better deals between small businesses and suppliers by leveraging the group purchasing power of the website's user base.
In early 2009, it was rapidly becoming evident that the needs of TBE had outgrown the original website. Brian Vuyk Web Design and Development was contracted to redevelop the website in a new format prioritizing user-friendliness and modern design.
Design
When the client approached us for the redevelopment, one of their larger complaints was that the theme on the original site was somewhat monotone and flat. They wanted the new design to be more vibrant & eye-catching.
The client also wanted the new website to be very intuitive. To this end, we have tried to make the controls fairly simple, obvious, and readable.
Module Choices
The Buying Exchange utilizes a relatively small set of contrib modules:
- CCK (With a few field modules such as Filefield & ImageField)
- Views
- Imagecache
- Admin Menu
- Advanced Forum
- BUEditor
- Pathauto
- Poormanscron
- Term Node Count
- XML Sitemap
Data Structure
The data structure for the main sections of The Buying Exchange is composed of two custom content types ('offer' and 'company') built using CCK.
A 'company' node contains all the information for a given company on the website, while an 'offer' node contains information pertaining to a specific offer.
Each 'offer' node is linked to a 'company' node by a CCK Node Reference field, in a one-to-many relationship. This allows each company to have multiple offers on the website. Each offer is classified into a category / taxonomy to allow it to be listed by term.
Using the new 'Relationships' ability in Views 2 allowed us to easily pull information from a company referenced by an offer, and use it within our views. As an example, the company logos in the front page offer listing are pulled from the company referenced by each offer.
Summary
In short, Drupal 6 allowed us to build this website in a much quicker and efficient fashion than other solutions the client evaluated. We were able to build the site on a relatively low budget, still offering the client exactly the functionality he needed, while still leaving open the possibility of future expansion on the Drupal framework.
