23-Dec-09 8:00 AM CST

Schipul and Drupal: How the Open-Source Community Helped Realize the Dreams of our Clients

At Schipul, we believe the cheese often moves. Our proprietary software Tendenci has been the bread and butter (in terms of revenue) for our company each year, but we know the Tendenci software specifically may not always be the best fit for a client. Sometimes, if the client wanted a simple site, using Tendenci would be like trying to force a square peg through a round hole.

It would be incredibly imprudent to believe that one shoe fits every consumer. Because of this, Schipul has come to embrace the open-source community. There are incredibly intelligent developers creating and modifying flexible content management systems like Wordpress and Drupal daily. In turn, their hard work gives Schipul the opportunity to present options other than Tendenci to our clients. We can create highly custom platforms for our clients at a cheaper cost to them and with a more direct focus on their business's workflow and consumers.

Drupal Development with the Web Entertainment Guide

At the beginning of 2009, a woman named Michelle Mower came to us with an idea: She wanted to be the go to Web site for all things relating to Internet TV. She wasn't talking about watching normal television shows on the Internet like your favorite sketch from this weekend's Saturday Night Live; rather, a very specific niche of television which actually doesn't involve television at all. Webisodes are individual episodes of a sitcom or drama that are only released on the Internet, and she wanted to create a resource for them and their fans.

Everyone knows of IMDb—you can go find out next to anything you could possibly want to know (and more) about a particular movie. But where do you start when it comes to this new breed of Web Entertainment? Michelle was already knee-deep in the webisode community having been Program Coordinator Houston's SWAMP (Southwest Alternative Media Project) for quite some time, but she wanted a place to disseminate the information, quickly and easily. This is where the Web Entertainment Guide was born, in collaboration with Michelle, Schipul, and the Drupal community.

A Drupal site was the perfect choice. For example, Tendenci didn't come with a Webisode module, and it certainly wouldn't make business sense to write and implement one that would only be used by a very small subset of our clients. But what did make sense was to take the Drupal development platform and utilize its "from the ground up" customization:

We could create a Webisode content type using Drupal's community-submitted CCK (Content Creation Kit) module, that contained any fields Michelle wanted.
We could tag and organize Webisodes any way we wanted to allow for complete search capability. Want to view all Webisodes by Horror genre (like myself)? No problem.
We could create four separate blogs within the Drupal framework she could have writers contribute to.
We could extend the Webisode reach by creating an Interview content type where all Michelle had to do was put the Interview information into the system once, and Drupal could spit it out in a number of places throughout her site without her having to do anything.

Moving Forward with Drupal Development

Don't hear me wrong: Tendenci still serves its purpose and is a wonderful product option for protential clients and is one that continually satisfies current customers. But when the project doesn't fit the Tendenci bill, Drupal and Wordpress have been go-tos that will impress even your hard-to-impress friends.

It's important to give thanks to those out there in the Drupal community who put in the hard work to make our jobs easier. And if you're looking for a custom project, let us know. Give us a call and we can talk about Drupal sites with you. We love it and know you will too.