This web product allows you to name your home on the houseregister.org. Naming your house is a beautiful symbolic gesture, and so they supply all customers with a physical postal pack containing the FAQ factsheet, Welcome letter and the officially stamp sealed certificate, all sent complementary as part of their service. Their automated systems check to see if your home name has already been taken instantly so you don't have to wait for confirmation. The best part is you will have a unique house name within the local area in which no one else can have.
About the project
Project Goals
The primary aim of the project was to create 2 separate websites. One serving as application registry, where users can apply for the registry using a detailed guided interactive process. The second site was meant for searching the existing registry and the data would be fed through an API from the former site.
Requirements
Application Site
The main requirement for this site http://housenameregister.org was to create a guided application procedure and a robust search. The application procedure would be map based, and users can type in a location and then filter more by moving pointers in a map. Once done, they select their preferred house names, and users get real time feed on the quality of the house name they have chosen and also if the name they have chosen is available. Also, for payment, it needed to have deep Stripe integration and each application needed to be charged a predefined fee as set by the admin through a settings form.
Registry Search Site
The site http://houseregister.org/ needed to consume the data from the main application registry site. For this we integrated services module and created the search through Search API + Apache SOLR Backend. The search was carefully configured and needed to be suitably modified through the hooks, which also included N-Gram Algorithm. Once the results are displayed, the google map skin needed a customisation.
Backend
The client needed some specific backend features. Notable among those are as follows:
- Detailed graph implementation of the sales for which we implemented using Highcharts module
- Certificate and Label Print Ready Preview Pages - For this, we implemented the MPDF module in our custom code. The data for each application was needed to be exported by admin to 2 print ready PDFs, for each, the data positioned in a specific layout.
- A detailed and in depth content management system for full control of the basic pages, site content and images for the static sections.
Outcome
The project turned out to be an excellent platform for users to be able to apply and register their house names. The application procedure turned out to be extremely smooth and user friendly. The UI/UX enhancements that we provided to the entire application and search process was extremely well received, both by the client and the site users. Overall, another excellent product rolled out with perfection and precision.
Why Drupal was chosen
Initially the client was not sure if they would like to use Drupal. They never came across Drupal, and were not sure of it's capabilities. They used Wordpress earlier, and did not have a good experience. hence they wanted to use core PHP for the development. Our team met with them and demonstrated the benefits this site would derive if Drupal was used. The client was impressed, after doing an in depth review of our proposed benefits. For us, of course the choice was simple, because of our past experience with Drupal, and the power of the framework that we were already aware of. Once the project completed, the client was really impressed with the platform and the backend we could provide them with for fine grained control of not only the functionalities and payment management, but also it's excellent performance as a CMS, since we had given them full control of the informational pages and sites graphics and images. Overall, it's great being feeling being able to educate people regarding the immense potential of Drupal, and eventually being able to bring them on board.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
- Address Field and Addressfield autocomplete modules were used to provide the interactive address entry during the application process. The base modules needed to be customised through necessary hooks and patches in order to provide some additional spice ups.
- The Search was implemented using SOLR + Search API and Services module was used to expose the search to the other site.
- The certificate feature was implemented using the PDF using MPDF as base module, which provided us with the base work, but then these were heavily customised.
- Stripe was used as payment gateway for each application node. Again base work provided by the module and we wrote a suite of helper modules to enhance the integration further.
- Highcharts module was used for the graphs and charts in admin end.
