drupal case studies

APQC.org Goes Drupal

APQC is a best practices organization that provides information and research on benchmarking, knowledge management, measurement, and process improvement to its approximately 40,000 members. APQC’s somewhat rare in the web world because its product is its content. Obviously, a robust and flexible content management framework is critical.
 
In early May, APQC launched a new site in Drupal, the culmination of 6 months of effort. Achieve Internet led the development, beginning with analysis and planning sessions in October 2009. The major tasks were to migrate APQC’s content from the existing Interwoven CMS, perform the necessary Drupal configurations and customizations, address the various integration points, and tune for performance and scalability.

Site Functionality

In many ways, the functionality APQC desired is perfect for Drupal. They needed a platform that would allow them to:

• share and publish content in a variety of forms
• efficiently manage document workflow
• offer community-building features such as blogs, a ratings system, user-created groups, find-a-peer, and forums
• sell content at different prices to different types of users
• handle content access permissions via a robust group management system

 
Although there were significant development challenges associated with developing APQC's enterprise-scale solution, Drupal rose to the occasion.

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.