Doctors of BC

The new Doctors of BC website replaced an aging Drupal 6 website and quite a bit of custom code. The website serves two main purposes:

1. Providing both sales and communication for members and non-members of the Doctors of BC,
2. And facilitating membership renewals and special offers for members.

Drupal was great at providing some powerful out of the box features and was flexible enough that we could bring that functionality to a particularly un-savvy user base.

The project provided the opportunity to utilize the CMS functionality of Drupal to provide a great content management and consuming experience, and to use the built-in tools to connect to third party sources to bring in data from disparate systems.

Key Features

Members Section

Doctors of BC's membership system is an in-house, custom-developed application that manages all aspects of membership and billing information for the organization. The old site contained quite a few custom modules that needed to be upgraded to Drupal 7 while being made more robust and easier to maintain. Even though the public side of the site is quite large and complex, it doesn't come close to the amount of work that went into the members only section of the site. With roughly 18,000 member accounts migrated over and a complicated third party database integration, the members section took the lion's share of budgeted time to complete. Invoices, dues, and society memberships all needed to be brought into a nice and easy to use interface.

Ecommerce

Ecommerce was a large portion of the members only section, allowing members to pay their membership dues, outstanding invoices, and even purchase discounted items such as sporting tickets, movie tickets, and ski passes. Using the Commerce suite of modules as the foundation for the site gave us a leg up in the cart department and allowed us to put our development time into some of the more unique features of the cart such as timed expiration of cart contents and the limiting of products per category, to name a few. With Commerce's pre-built administration views and cart workflow our client had everything they needed to manage all commerce transactions on the site and reduce the amount of time dealing with the headaches of a custom built cart.

Responsive

Not only does the layout adjust for screen dimensions, it also adapts to environment interaction. Mouse clicks don't always smoothly translate to taps, so we made sure to respect the native input methods.

Tag Subscriptions and Favorites

A requirement from the Doctors of BC was a way to pin or bookmark both single pages as well as tagged collections of content within the site. The flag module got us most of the way there with the 2.0 branch allowing flagging of any entity which let us create a group of tags that a member could subscribe to. Using views we displayed a dynamic list of content to the members based on tags they had flagged. The second flag problem we encountered was the ability to flag non-content pages. Landing pages built with views and any custom pages created for the members section weren't entities, so flagging them was not possible with just the Flag module. After a few patches to Flag Pages, however, members were free to bookmark any page on the site.

Content Administration

Using Panels and Panelizer allowed us to create a simple drag and drop interface for the content administrators to place content anywhere and whenever they want. Not only did it simplify content management for the Doctors of BC team, but also reduced the training time and support calls for something that should be pretty straightforward for a content management system. We also spent a lot of time creating a streamlined content editing interface so our client could add media and blocks inline, stage draft content and even preview content within the sites theme before publishing.

Project Management

For this site, project management was a partnered effort with Cossette, who was responsible for the Doctors of BC rebranding, site design and requirements analysis. We faced a tight timeline from the start, but knowing we had the experience and organizational tools to handle the demand we were excited to take this project on.

Doctors of BC, Cossette, and Fuse management had weekly meetings to review the project’s progress and discuss any outstanding items for that time. Fuse and Cossette’s project managers also had ongoing calls daily to discuss specific components of the site.

For all of our projects at Fuse Interactive we use a project management tool called Active Collab. It gives us one central location for all client and internal communication as well as timelines, milestones, issue tracking, and task assignments.

Active Collab was readily accepted and used by both Cossette and Doctors of BC management for task assignment and online discussions. When we reached the QA phase we reported all functionality bugs and change requests in a shared Google Docs Spreadsheet due to the high number of people reporting during this phase. It helped to eliminate any duplicate items and further refine any nonspecific requests. Once approved, all requests were quickly moved over to Active Collab for task assignment.