CiviCRM

Links into languages was a UK government funded project to provide CPD courses to UK school languages teachers.

This was a big project, with a wide ranging remit and feature requirements. Regional teams required identical subsections on the site, separately access controlled. The site also needed to provide user accounts for customers to sign up to mailing lists and register for events, and a CRM to manage and deal with customers efficiently.

After extensive collection and analysis of the customer requirements, the site was implemented using a Drupal and CiviCRM combination. Extensive customisation was done on both pieces of software. I created drupal modules to collect custom signup information integrated with the CRM and provide navigation for some of the more complex site sections. The login form was highly customised using AJAX techniques to cope with extra custom fields and choosing from a database of over 40,000 organisations. CRM customisations included search alterations, a customised access control system and many custom reports. Integration between the public facing event registration system on the website and the CRM was also developed. An automated mailing system was also implemented to send mailshots to customers along with HTML email templates.

A custom drupal theme was produced to match the design with web standards and accessibility in mind. In particular, progressive enhancement principles were used to make sure the interactive parts of the site worked with and without javascript and/or css.

Since there was a large staff base for the administration side of the site, extensive template and css customisation of the back-end and CRM was also performed to slim down and simplify the options to the administrative users.