"Through the process of creating my website, I have been very impressed with Chris's technical knowledge and understanding of website development, content management and maintenance. His great communication skills and accessibility made the project easy and enjoyable. I am very happy with my site and highly recommend his work!"
This module was more of a web application than a page. It was a web 2.0 interface that allowed for players who signed up to participate in a sporting event to be grouped into groups of friends then placed onto teams. The entire interface was laid out using jQuery drag-and-drop functionality.
The initial data set was pulled from the database. Boxes matching players, groups and teams were drawn onto the screen and could then be dragged and dropped into other groups or into teams. All changes were local on the screen and were not saved to the database until the user confirmed the changes.
A number of boundaries were put in place such as a limit to the number of players who could be in a team and the number of teams that were allowed to exist for a certain registration group. Also, gender counts became important as this was a coed league and there were certain requirements for the number of male and female players per team.
One of the most complex modules we built was one that integrated with the SalesForce CRM system. The goal behind this was to sync certain SalesForce objects with Drupal objects. For example, SalesForce Accounts were equivalent to a node type in Drupal. When one was created on either system, a notification was sent to the other via a SOAP interface to create its companion in the other system. The same relationship existed between Contacts and users etc.
One of the biggest challenges here was to keep the data valid as the SalesForce system had different data validation algorithms than Drupal and thus data entered from one side may not validate on the other. A number of security failsafes and content entry protocols were put in place to help prevent this.
A unique feature that we incorporated was integrating the permissions system into certain SalesForce data when rendered in Drupal. Contacts who belonged to certain Accounts in SalesForce were subsequently allowed to access certain content on the Drupal site that others weren't. Because the data could change on the SalesForce side quickly and timely, the website needed to be as accurate as possible.
Another important issue was server speed. Because there were so many calls back and forth between the website and SalesForce, we needed to integrate a local management system that would later sync the data to SalesForce only when certain updates were performed. This prevented consistet data fetching from an external source.