Sector(s)
Team Members
TechShop came to Black Antelope with a need for a new responsive e-commerce Drupal website to be designed and built. Their old CRM also needed to be migrated from ColdFusion to Drupal, and for the main website and CRM to share data via custom APIs. Not only was this needed for the US stores, but it was also needed for the growing roster of international partnerships, including in France through Adeo / Leroy Merlin, Japan through Fujitsu, and the government of Abu Dhabi.
About the project
We worked with TechShop for a long period of time, working on various website needs including improvements to their existing ColdFusion CRM, special program landing pages, fundraising efforts, new store launches, and of course the new website and CRM migration.
TechShop was growing internationally through partnerships, and so we had the opportunity to deploy the new system for their partners in France, Japan, and Abu Dhabi.
Why Drupal was chosen
Drupal was chosen for its flexibility in being able to solve all of TechShop's needs, including a front-facing marketing and e-commerce website, where users could reserve equipment, purchase memberships and classes, and stay involved with their local maker community through various social networking features. Drupal was also a great platform choice for adapting and migrating TechShop's previous CRM, and improving on it. The front-facing website and CRM were separate systems but needed access to each other, and for this scenario Drupal was a perfect fit for designing and implementing custom RESTful APIs.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Drupal was chosen for its flexibility and ability to elegantly power TechShop's very unique needs, in terms of its marketing and e-commerce site, CRM system, social/community engagement, and for these separate systems to be able to communicate with each other.
We hosted the site on Acquia, which was a perfect fit because it runs on Amazon's AWS. This was an important factor as we began to roll out the TechShop system for international partners, so that hosting could be in the region for which the system was deployed.
