Sector(s)
Team Members
Project Team
Rexx Llabore - Developer
Steve Shen - Developer
Basecamp was used for most project management tasks and WebEX was used extensively for information sharing.
Cargoh.com was founded by Paul and Cariann Burger when they noticed the lack of avenues for independent artists, designers and musicians to get their work to the world. They realized that some of the most talented people in the world were making them coffee in the morning at the local coffee shop. They set out to change that by creating a super accessible, highly affordable and unbelievably feature rich venue for artists, designers and musicians to sell the things they create. Above that, they wanted to create the world's best online shopping mall for all the uniquely independent products in the world. So from those two missions, cargoh.com was born. The world's most exciting social marketplace for independent creatives!
In 2009 Appnovation was asked to design and develop a Drupal based community and e-commerce website called Cargoh. The driving idea behind the site is to create a “social marketplace” for independent artists from all over the world to be able to showcase and sell their products and services. It features community tools such as forums, an internal messaging system and events section.
About the project
The focus of Cargoh is to be “a single destination where artists, musicians, designers, and creators can be seen, heard, and collected in one community driven marketplace”. Keeping that in mind the design and functionality needed to be able to take into account all genres of art and how best to showcase them. Most types of products featured on the site were sufficient with visual showcasing via image uploads. Multiple images are able to be uploaded per product in order to provide alternate views when needed. For musicians the ability to upload songs through a song player on store fronts was developed.
Coming up with the design for Cargoh.com was an ongoing process that saw the site evolve many times up until site deployment. The layout mirrors other e-commerce sites in being product-centric. Wireframes were created using Omnigraffle for Mac. In the end it was decided that the site themes and colours would be kept minimal in order to let the products for sale by the site’s users be the focus keeping with the philosophy of Cargoh.com’s founders. The base theme layer used for the site was Garland that the designers stripped down and built on top of.
Before launch the client had only a rough idea regarding the amount of traffic. During development, we were periodically monitoring resource usage (such as memory and average response time) which gave us precise metrics of how many concurrent users could interact with the site given a specific hardware and software configuration. For launch we allocated a typical configuration to match the application requirements to the expected load. We since continuously monitor the website to identify bottlenecks, and we invest the required resources (memory, CPU, configuration, caching techniques, DB slaves, code optimization, query optimization, etc) in order to eliminate them in a very competitive way, which means we invest our resources where they have the largest impact.
Site Functionalities
The site needed to go beyond the standard buyer/seller feel by encouraging more interaction between all users. The site incorporates user profiles, discussion forums, an events listing area. Users are able to select and show a list of their favourite stores and connect to their Twitter and Facebook accounts. The homepage features a blog titled “Cargoh Loves” that covers the owners’ favourite stores, events or recent news in the art world.
The e-commerce component of the site is driven by Ubercart and integrates both PayPal and Beanstream. Other pluses afforded to Sellers are the ability to customize their storefronts using image and music uploads, an internal order and stock tracking system and integration of Google Analytics. Products and stores are promoted to the showcase on the homepage as users “bump” or like items for sale. There is also an advanced search that can be narrowed down by subcategories for products, shipping locations and store location.
Why Drupal was chosen
The client decided to go with Drupal because of the modular development that makes it so popular for community sites as well as its flexibility and scalability that will make the site easier to modify or expand as its user base grows. It was also chosen because it is an Open Source inexpensive choice (no application license costs) especially in consideration of the endless wealth of support and module options available through the Drupal community.
Technical Specifications
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
- Fbconnect - allows users to login on a Drupal website through the Facebook Connect API using their Facebook login and password
- MailChimp - provides integration with the MailChimp email delivery service that provides support for an unlimited number of mailing lists
- Google Analytics - allows you to add statistics features to your site like selectively tracking certain users, roles and pages
- Ubercart Marketplace - adds multiple seller support to the Ubercart module
- Voting - helps developers who want to use a standardized API and schema for storing, retrieving, and tabulating votes for Drupal content
