enterprise drupal workflow

CMS -> CRM

An important part of Achieve’s Bella Pictures project has been the integration of Ubercart/Drupal with Salesforce. Before Bella launched any Drupal sites, they used Salesforce.com to manage customers, contacts, and leads. They had invested a good deal of effort and money in customizing Salesforce to meet their organizational needs and, not surprisingly, wanted to continue using it.

So, in Bella's web site technology stack, Drupal had to perform customer-facing eCommerce tasks while also communicating effectively with Salesforce on the back end. The heart of the integration required Achieve to customize Drupal so it would automatically propagate orders and updates in Salesforce.

BellaPictures.com's portfolio page is one of the most important components of the site in terms of generating customers. On this page, Bella wanted to display the high-quality work of their photographers and also allow users to interact with the various portfolios in an application-like format.

The main focus of the page is a slideshow that displays wedding or engagement photos or, when available, a video. Below that are a small navigation bar and an image carousel. The left side of the page features information on the wedding and a link that allows the user to search for weddings in her/his area. Below this link is a list of other available wedding portfolios.

 

For all these components to work together, the Achieve Internet team had to dig deep into Views and JQuery.

Last week, San Francisco-based Bella Pictures launched a new Drupal site that allows couples to select, schedule, and pay for wedding photographers online, greatly reducing one of the major hassles of wedding planning. With a network of certified photographers throughout the US, Bella is now able to sell high quality, local services via the web while also centralizing and automating administrative tasks such as billing and scheduling.

BellaPictures.com’s launch is the culmination of a year plus “engagement” with Achieve Internet. The first project was a sister site called StudioBlue.com, which offered a limited set of products in a few geographic regions. When this proof-of-concept Drupal site (the rehearsal) was complete, we moved on to the flagship BellaPictures.com.

The notable technical challenges in this project related to: Ubercart modifications allowing for multiple product attributes and coupons; integration with SalesForce, Bella’s customer relationship management (CRM) platform; and integration with Authorize.net to support payment plans.

While Drupal 6 is still getting ready for production use, work on Drupal 7 is already under way. One of the major patches that made it in so far was the inclusion of SimpleTest into core. Unlike most patches, it doesn’t affect the end-user, but it affects developers and the development process.