Large database

Zappies is a fast-growing and innovative toy distributor and importer, based in West Sussex. They wanted a site that would make it easy for retailers to find products they are interested in from the thousands in stock. The site is automatically updated from stock data held in a Sage 50 database.

The site is built with Drupal 7. It uses Apache Solr Search for the facetted search facilities, and Drupal Commerce for the products and ordering. Custom permissions mean that the wholesale prices and other product details are only visible to trade customers who have logged in.

This site has some complex e-commerce features, including VAT handling, export order capability, various different product discount and combined purchase discounts, and more. Custom content types were generated to make it easy to add and manage the many small "box adverts" that link from each page to other relevant pages on the site. The Drupal theme was constructed to make a working version of a series of Photoshop designs. This was a long and complex job to achieve the page layouts, especially for products, required.

Pushnote was a system that allows people to comment publicly on any website on the internet. The site had Stephen Fry as a business partner, so had a relatively high profile on the internet. To cope with the expected large initial demand, when Mr Fry tweeted about the new site, the system was installed on three dedicated servers at RackSpace, plus a firewall and load balancer.

The long-standing Skills Workshop website was proving to be very time-consuming for the owner, Maggie Harnew, to keep updated. New contributors continued to send in new teaching resources, but the time taken to add resources to the site meant that a back-log was building up. Luckily, Maggie won the LSIS Star Award 2009 in the Skills for Life category, and the prize money funded conversion of the site into a Drupal content-managed site. This has enabled Maggie to spend more time concentrating on editing submitted resources, and less time having to maintain the web pages themselves.