One of the main struggles, among many others in the coronavirus period, is the ability of a business to adapt itself to government decisions and the people's mood.
For many businesses, this adaption must be reflected in the website, and what makes things even more complicated is that these massive changes must be done while keeping the data. Unfortunately, there are many reasons which makes it almost impossible or very hard to achieve, due to several main reasons:
- The website platform isn’t flexible enough.
- The agency team isn’t a good fit.
- The cost is too risky.
We didn’t choose Drupal fourteen years ago due to Covid or any other similar circumstances, we chose Drupal mainly for the flexibility and the way it’s allowing us to create a website. I am not going to mention the benefits of Drupal, nor am I going to compare it to other platforms such as WordPress. Instead, I'll describe how Drupal helped us aid the Tower Of David Museum during the quarantine, and in between quarantine periods.
The Tower Of David is a large e-commerce website which sells tickets, with real-time integration to Priority and a complex architecture for any type of roles coming to the site. We implemented a super complex cart functionality that comes with custom coupons methods for different roles, different payment methods for multiple line items in the same cart, custom Up-Sales, edited functionality, and more.
And then, the museum got closed!
Once that happened, the client came to us with a bunch of ideas. For this example I will focus on only one of them, which might look small, but have a huge impact on the client's upcoming business plan.
Since a user can’t visit the museum the obvious choice will be to allow him to participate in online webinars and have the option to view the webinars recordings on the site. Since we use Drupal best practices while designing and developing the website, most of the requirements were easy to manage, as well as the edge cases.
Here are the requirements and what we did:
- User area where he can watch his recordings.
- Associate multiple webinar video recordings to the user purchase.
- Option to purchase video recordings.
- Modify the events & search results page.
User area:
- Login and register - Drupal provides an out of the box user registration process, including notifications, password recovery, login, and so on. We just needed to add some nice UX to the forms.
- Register via the checkout process - We use Drupal Commerce out of the box feature with real-time integration to Priority to double-side check inventory, prices, and coupons validation. Using Drupal entity referenced we also limited this only in case the cart has an event tagged under a specific category.
- Video recording area - Drupal provides Views powerful tools in the core which allows us to quickly create complex lists and display them with the right permission access to the user according to his purchases.
Associate multiple webinar video recordings to the user purchase:
Purchasing an Online event type act as a purchase video recording, and we accomplish this using Drupal's powerful reference tool which allows the editor to link between an event to multiple video recording pages.
The Video Recording is yet another content type with its related fields and data, and a nice looking internal video recording page. Then we manipulate the view to display the user on his profile page only their video pages related to the event he purchased.
Option to purchase video recordings:
A future request soon to get done, and a simple one I liked the most. To directly sell Video recordings we will change the Video recording content type into a product. Since like many other cool and amazing Drupal modules, the Commerce module also builds on entities and is so flexible you can create any type of product with it.
Modify the events & search results page:
Finally, we needed to adjust the search results page, which is also the event’s lobby page. This is also quite easy since this page builds on Views and we just needed to perform some minor changes to the Online events will be the main.
Display Video recording at the store page:
This is also done easily with the Views powerful core module. We just needed to add the Video recording content type to the display, adjust the display, and the fields display and that's it!
As you can see, Drupal is a truly powerful CMS, and I find that unlike many other CMS out there, it’s not thinking for you, it has an amazing community with real high-quality developers, a very good and solid API and the Drupal 8 core gives you the option to build not only powerful and rich websites but also websites that can constantly grow with the businesses and easily adjust to his changes.