What the client needed:
Online LEED Education (not real name of the company) is an e-commerce company selling online courses for LEED exam and Project Experience program. Their old platform used a third-party shopping cart over which they did not have much control. They wanted to create a new Drupal based platform which was highly flexible and could be customized to their ever-changing needs.
Solution we provided:
We decided to create the e-commerce platform using Drupal Commerce. To address the mobile market, we decided to go with responsive theming. We also integrated the new Online Education site with Online Network using Single-Sign On so that the members can log into both the sites using a single login and it is easier to cross-promote sites.
Project Outcome:
Online Education got a new, flexible Drupal Commerce based platform to sell their online courses. They were so happy with our service that they retained us on a monthly basis for further development.
More Details:
Online Education wanted a new, flexible platform to sell online LEED courses and Project Experience program. Their older website used a third-party shopping cart which was difficult to customize. We suggested that they go with Drupal Commerce.
There were two challenges in creating this site. One, each course has an expiry date. This is easy to do if the countdown timer starts from the time the course is bought. But Online Education wanted to start this countdown timer from the time the course was first accessed. We had to create custom logic to note down the first access time for any course and then deny access to the course once it has expired.
The second challenging part of this site was integrating it with Online Network site using Single-Sign On. This way all the users could log in on Online Network and they would be automatically logged into Online Education. This way it's much easier to cross-promote using coupons. The challenge was that Online Network required first name and last name to register while Online Education didn't. In fact, by default, Drupal Commerce would automatically create an account whenever an anonymous user registered for a course. With the first name and last name requirement, Drupal Commerce could no longer create this account. We solved this problem by letting Drupal Commerce create the user account using a default first name and last name and then creating a custom rule that would extract first name and last name from the billing profile and updating the user profile on Online Network site using Services.
The Online Education site is also responsive created using an Omega sub-theme. This way it's easily accessible on mobile, tablet as well as desktop devices. We also worked on performance optimization of the site and decreased page load times using Memcache and Varnish.