Portfolio Details

• Category: Web Development
• Company Name: Activity.me
• Used Technology: Drupal, PHP & MySQL, HTML, CSS & jQuery

Description

Our client – the real story

Our client Angelo Vassiliades is the founder of a web startup Activity.Me (http://www.activity.me) which provides ideas and information about various adventure activities such as Abseiling, Coastal Walks, Cycling, Dragon Boating, Hiking, Horse Riding, Rock Climbing, Scuba Diving, Skiing, Surfing, etc. organized at different places in Australia, which users take interest and participate in. Very often, they also share their adventure trip experience, its related information and recommend others about it by using this web-based community.

For the development of an adventure activity site, the client wanted a web system where users can get information about activity destination, cost, duration, upcoming events, etc. along with a platform where he/she can share his/her experiences. Precisely, the client’s requirements were:

• A nice, attractive and appealing theme.
• More editable terms and flexibility in the back-end area.
• To create star rating features for each activity to show its popularity.
• Google map for the adventure activity destination so that user can plan his/her route for traveling.
• Event calendar configuration to know activities to be done, reported by admin.
• To provide a ‘Share an Experience’ form where the users can share their activities and experiences by filling out this form using Facebook login or website access.

Challenges – the obstacles

Not only the afore mentioned, the client also wants a solution by which admin, as well as the registered users, can check his/her history of activities, edit profile, search events within a time frame. In order to meet the requirements of the client, we have faced number of challenges such as:

• Development of a theme page as per client’s requirements.
• To create feedback and suggestion form with various effects and features.
• To show web mapping service application with activity destination.
• Customized event calendar for upcoming activities.
• Admin interface to create activity with custom form layout.

The Complexities and The solutions – The Edge

All the challenges were overcome by appropriate solutions e.g. to develop an attractive theme page, different themes were applied and then CSS and Drupal core features were used for its implementation. Although, the challenges were not very much difficult to overcome but there were various technical complexities in the achievement of target which were faced:

1. While developing client-specific theme-based home page and inner pages, different complexities were in our way which we resolved using CSS, HTML, Drupal core, & JS effects.
2. To show activity event calendar as per location, destination & difficulties of the activities. This problem again was resolved by using Drupal Core along with Event Calendar, Taxonomy, jQuery & CSS.
3. When we had to display activities on Google Maps. Showing specific location of the activity which users want was actually the task; however, with experts in team, we fixed this issue using contributed module and done changes as per the client’s requirements.
4. With the functionality of ‘Share An Experience’ Form where we had to give access to the user to share his/her experience of any activity task. Although this was the last but not the least complexity we accomplished this also with the help of Webform, and Drupal Core module.

To overcome every challenge and complexity, a multiphase implementation schedule was devised and executed. User data has been regulated as per site’s standards which include peer reviews, photos, and validation of activity descriptions to enhance the appeal and usage by the online community members.

The much-awaited output – activity.me

The final output is an attractive web portal for adventure activities which is solely developed using the best web development technology Drupal 7. A different application programming interface (API) of various social networking and event sites including Facebook, Twitter, blog, RSS feed with the latest PHP image library are also used so that users can interact with these social networking services using the client’s web platform and vice-versa. The simple example of it – you can login to activity.me by using your Facebook account. The client worked collaboratively with our web development team and guided us through the website’s concept and assured that all perquisites were met. He accepted the final version of the website with great applauds and gave it a name “activity.me”.