drupal case studies

Bella Pictures is in the business of making people’s dreams come true. The San Francisco-based company has transformed the wedding photography industry through its innovative direct-to-consumer, “white label” and traditional retail Web sites. But that wasn’t always the case.

While Bella was founded by a team of professionals with backgrounds in photojournalism, e-commerce and marketing, its Web site was originally intended to generate leads for a national network of photographers, not to sell. “The main marketing site was hand-crafted php,” recalls Steve Morgan, Bella’s chief technology officer. “We’d outsourced with other partners and used a number of different applications to develop it. As a result, it was all over the map.”

Before tackling its main Web site revise, Bella decided to launch Studio Blue – a new, direct-to-consumer site that offers wedding photography for under $1,000 – in June 2009. With the desire to explore ecommerce, but lacking an open-source content management system to do it, Bella turned to Achieve Internet to create a dynamic Drupal-based site.

We’ve been working for a while with Bella Pictures to develop a new wedding photography Drupal site, and it went live Tuesday 3/30. Visit at www.bellapictures.com. The site allows couples to select, schedule, and pay for wedding photographers online, greatly reducing one of the major hassles of wedding planning. And with a network of certified photographers throughout the US, Bella is able to sell high quality, local services via the web while also centralizing and automating administrative tasks such as billing and scheduling. Achieve Internet’s work on the site was focused mainly on architecture design, integration services, and custom Drupal development.

Founded in 2002, Bella Pictures is an award-winning company that is transforming the wedding photography and videography industry. Bella's technology-driven approach brings new standards of quality, service and transparency to capturing and sharing your wedding memories. Founded by a team of professionals with backgrounds in photojournalism, e-commerce and marketing, they provide superior quality wedding photography by certifying photographers throughout the United States. This unique approach removes the guesswork in picking a wedding photographer and ensures a quality product every time.Â

A few reports have already been written about the "Fields in Core" coding sprint that was held December 15th - 19th at the Acquia offices in Andover, Massachusetts. While some of them are more technical, I decided to try to give you a good idea of what we spent our time doing. For the more technical ones check the "field in core" group.

Social networking is not a new term, nor has it been widely applied to websites for more than a few years, yet it has clearly become one of the biggest buzz phrases of the Web 2.0 era. Nonetheless a great deal of confusion exists about just what makes a particular site an online social network. Of course, there's more than one answer, but most of us know this type of site when we see one, so clearly there are some common features that must be easy to recognize.

According to Wikipedia (in many ways an online social network in its own right):