Building Drupal Website for a Global Model Search Network

The Solution

Our team successfully build a website tailored to the client's requirements, within 3 months of the project commencement.

Key Features of the Website

Talent Profile page

• About Me section: Enabling models to write briefly about themselves.
• Comments: Registered users in the website can leave comments which are visible in the Comments tab; some details such as photograph of the commenter are available along with the comment.
• My friends section: Visible in a photo listing format with in the Friends tab.
• Several parameters such as Height, Weight, Age, Bust, and several other model profile parameters entered along with the profile.
• A preview of the various types of Portfolio, such as Glamour, Fitness, Runaway, Swimwear, Fashion and an Editorial pick, is available in the profile page as well.
• The model on the profile could be contacted using an internal messaging system.

Cropping Photos online

• While creating a portfolio, this feature, allows any Talent (Model/Hair Stylist/others) to crop the uploaded images real-time (on the website) before publishing the same in their respective portfolio

Status Updates and Social Engagements

• The website has a whole range of social networking features such as Status updates
• Add Friends – Any member can send “Add as Friend” requests to other registered members on this website
• Share Photos among the friends' network
• Registered members can Like photos
• Board - pulls friend's activities, in a manner similar to Facebook's News Feed

Portfolio Management

• Different Casting Types such as Models, Hairdressers have a different set of pre-defined portfolios, e.g.: for models the pre-defined portfolios are Glamour, Fitness, Runaway, Swimwear, Fashion and Editorial.
• Based on the membership type and casting type, there are different rules applicable such as how many pictures can be uploaded, etc.

Talent Searches

• Registered members on the portal can search for talent based on a range of profile parameters, location (with a location based search within a certain radius), etc.
• One key feature in this model search is the user-friendly Javascript sliders to define search criteria, and further filter the results

Image Galleries

• Image galleries are available for registered users to search through Portfolio of the models, based on the Casting Type of the Member.
• For instance a Model has a portfolio genre (Editorial, Fashion, Swimwear, etc.) which is different from that of a Hairdresser

Agency Search

• Agencies are registered and Agency members added as members on the website
• Talent can search for Agencies registered on the website using an “Agency Search” feature, based on the Country and City
• Anonymous users can also search, although with limited access

Paid Memberships

• The website has a Free and Paid membership model which determines various rules for various types of members (Casting Type - Models, Hair Dresser, etc.) such as how many images can be uploaded, etc.
• There is payment associated with each such membership
• Payments follow a recurring model

Multi-Lingual Support

• The website is available in 20 countries and in 3 languages – English, Spanish and Italian
• The website even has support of sending newsletter emails in multiple languages

Multilingual support in email

• The website enables previewing and sending email newsletters in Spanish and Italian languages as well
• The key feature is that Editorial Notification from the website can be sent out to the Members in the language of the choice specified in their respective profiles
• These email Notifications can be further switched On/Off by the registered member

Events

• As most social websites, Events forms an important part of this website as well.
• There is a facility to see all upcoming events as well as all past events

Notifications

• Editors have a way to send bulk notifications to all registered members or to selected profile (Models/Photographers)

Enabling Social Networking Features
For adding the Social Networking Features, we used Heartbeat and Flag modules respectively. However, Heartbeat module does NOT provide a "Like" button on Comments (at the time we used the module). Therefore, it extended “Flag" module to show "Like" button on the Heartbeat module based Comment.

Multi-language Newsletters
For sending the multi-Language newsletters, the Previewable Email Template was used. However, this module did NOT provide support for multiple languages. Therefore, a wrapper was written on top of PET to ensure emails could be sent out in multiple languages. This was written such a way that if an email template for a particular language was not available then it would send the mail in the default language.