Bizzcard lets you create a digital business card for yourself, or your company's employees, with a unique web page address and a simple, responsive design optimised for viewing on mobile devices . It creates a seamless digital experience which is better than paper. It means removing all existing barriers of card sharing, storing and usage, and making the process as simple as possible. Bizzcard makes digital cards smarter than ever, helping your business to stand out from the crowd and improve your sales effectiveness. You can also share your card easily with QR codes. Scan the QR code of a business card and it will be shared with you. While the informational website needed to be designed and implemented, the backend website portal needed to be i drupal, which we needed to design and develop as well.
About the project
Goals
The main goal of the project was to create the backend functionality the companies would be able to register themselves, and then be able to create departments or groups. They design some pre created template through the proposed drag and drop builder which we were supposed to create. Once done, companies would invite various category managers and they would then be able to create business. They wanted to monetise this by allowing creation of unlimited business cards but only be able to make certain cards live at any point of time, through quotas. Also more quotas could be purchased.
Requirements
Backend Templating
The client wanted to use Metronic UI based template for the backend. We, from the scratch, integrated metronic UI and properly preprocessing all drupal elements, provided a seamless integration experience.
Registration, Profile Set Up and Group Creation
Users register into the site as company admin, also called as general manager. Once a company registers, they will be taken through a wizard to fill in various profile information. Once completed, the admin needed to create various templates employing the drag and drop page builder feature which we implemented. After that, general manager will create various category managers and assign them to various categories. Also, they would assign quotas so that category managers can only make certain number of business cards live.
Drag and Drop Page Builder
One of the major requirement of the project was that we needed to come up with a drag and drop page builder. We used open source grapejs as the base for this, and continued to do heavy customisation of the plugin to perfectly suit our needs. Everything about the plugin was customised, including the available tools, widgets and base template. We also implemented back button functionality using the local storage. This page builder needed a lot of back and forth testing, but we put in a lot of efforts and ensured that this turned out to be exactly what the client needed, as this was the most crucial part of the project.
Payment Integration and Quota Feature
The client wanted to integrate a few local payment providers based in Israel and we implemented custom drupal commerce payment plugin API for this. Once the gateways were up, we integrated those with the concept of quota. Basically once a company registers, they will be awarded certain free quota. A quote is the number of business cards that can stay active any any point of time. Companies can create as many business card as they line, but they at certain point of time, only those many business cards can be live which is less than or equal to the allowed quota. Also the quota can be delegated per category. So category managers needed to respect the per category quota when they activated any business card for that category.
Outcome
The drag and drop builder turned out to be much more user friendly what the client had expected. It was super easy to design web pages through that, with the help of around 24 tools, even for someone non technical. With the drag and drop builder working perfectly, which was really the heart of the project, rest of the functionality pieces were also pulled off by our team in great style. The client was extremely satisfied with the end product and as usual, for us, if the client is happy, we are successful.
Why Drupal was chosen
After viewing through the requirement spec, our team found Drupal to be the right fit for this project as we believed this will give a good solid foundation for the complicated functionalities that would come up. The main requirement of this project was to build a complex business card designer. It was in a way, encompass traditional 'business card' and be a sort of 'business web page'. Now, in the next phase, this frag and drop builder needed to be supplemented with a wizard based card creation mechanism and we believed this and other planned feature list would be much easily achieved in Drupal than any other frameworks owing to Drupal's awesome developer's API and ease of creating complex data structures in the form of content types.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
The major work in the project has been with the website builder, which relied heavily on the grapejs implementation. This was consumed through various Drupal APIs, most notably Ajax API and Forms API. The profile was constructed through Profile2, Field Collection and it's associated array of modules. Rest all, most of the work was custom coded, and since this was integrated into Metronic UI, there has been heavy customisation in the Views templating and other standard drupal element preprocess functions.
