Overview

The Artistically Connected project, found at http://artisticallyconnected.com, is a website that enables Artists to purchase a membership to the site which enables them to post their art on the site. Artists have profiles that will include contact information as well as information regarding how site visitors can purchase art directly from the Artist.

Membership Workflow

Memberships to Artistically Connected are sold through Ubercart, one of Drupal's leading shopping cart systems, as a product. The Drupal role of Artist is assigned to users who purchase a membership. This role defines the content they can post to the site, i.e. Profiles and descriptions of their Art. Contact information as well as how to purchase the piece of art pulled form their Artist Profile is included in the content post.

Trial Membership

Upon registration to the site, every user gets a free 30 day trial of a full Artist Membership. This allows artists to try out Artistically Connected's services without having to pay upfront. The logic behind the trial membership functionality is built out using the Rules Module.

Artist Profiles

Members will have profiles that will include general information about the user and contact information. The artist profile functionality was implemented using the Content Profile module. Drupal 6 is not able to add fields directly to users. The Content Profile module allows these fields to be added to a node instead and then associates this node to the user. Artist Profiles also has fields for recording physical location location of the artist. This functionality was built using the Location module to collect the address information via CCK fields. The artist locations are geocoded and shown on a map by the Gmap module.

User Registration

Sales team members have the ability to create and track promotional codes. These codes will be used by new users during the registration process. The Registration Codes module was used to provide this functionality. Unlike other "toolkit" type of Drupal modules, the Registration Codes module was pretty much matched exactly what the client was looking for out of the box.

Content Classification

Content posts are posted into categories and organized into configurable lists. The Views is responsible for displaying all of the content that is organized into categories defined by taxonomy terms. Some of these displays include an exposed filter on price range and other criteria required by the client. Most of the displays are styled as grids. Some of these displays have tabs that allow site visitors to further drill down on the current set of items in the view. This functionality is provided by the Views Display Tabs module. One other notable feature regarding the display of content is the little slider showing the "featured art" in a 1x4 grid of thumbnails. With the help of the Views Slideshow module and custom styling, we get this fancy display sliding four items in at a time.

Theming

The design was provided by the client. This design was then made into a custom Drupal theme using Fusion as a base theme. To resolve a client request of putting the tags of a piece of content into the header as keyword metatags, Drupal's page pre-processing abilities are used. Basically, the array containing all of the taxonomy terms for that piece of content are broken out and placed into a pre-processed page variable that is then printed in the header as said keyword metatag.