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http://moblues.org

Give us some background on some of the members of your team and the company that you work for.

Feisty Goat Interactive is a small firm consisting of a couple of designers and our lead developer. We deal primarily with site design/redesign, branding and marketing, and graphic design for digital media although we’ve done some print work in the past.

Feisty’s goal is to create simple, meaningful designs that focus on usability and communication because that’s really what we’re trying to do here right?

We love producing great work but ultimately what we’re all about is enriching people’s lives. It’s one of our core philosophies and extends not only to the message a client’s trying to communicate, but also how we approach content management and trying to ease changes to our users’ publishing workflow.

Tell us about the site. What vision were you trying to fill for the client?

We set out to create a site that would really showcase MO Blues events, which is the primary point of contact with their community. The existing site was using a simple Google calendar for providing event information so we really wanted to bring events to the forefront of the site. Large dates, band listing, and sponsor venue were all things that needed placement.

We also knew that member bands were most-likely already managing some sort of online presence. We created small, jumping-off points that would allow simple profiles and highlight social media for the bands with minimal management required.

The initial vision was to modernize both their look-and-feel as well as their business and how they were maintaining their member information. They wanted to move all of their operations online which was a big job for any CMS.

Was there a specific reason why EE was chosen for this project? Why?

Because of the different content types, membership/subscription management, and workflow, ExpressionEngine was an ideal fit.  MO Blues events were constantly driving our development process and we thought ExpressionEngine seemed like the best CMS for the job.  Constructing the events, new & noteworthy, and listing the bands and sponsors was a breeze using EE2.x.  We could architect the site to do exactly what we needed from the ground up.

What add-ons were used? and why?

MO Blues has over 140 members and needed a way to manage how they interact with the website. They wanted MO Blues members to update events, news, and easily pay and renew for subscriptions. After studying what it would take to build a custom subscription module, because of time, the decision was made to use Electric Function’s Membrr module. Membrr out of the box did almost everything we needed, including a payment gateway and easy to use tags. Because of some tailored actions, we used custom SQL, but overall, the Membrr module saved the client over 40 hours worth of work.

To ensure clean output, we used a combination of Clean HTML from Abu Musa and SuperGeekery Tag Stripper. Because the newsletters are for members only, we used Bengamin David’s Downloader plugin. While fairly basic, it was all we needed to prevent hot-linking and allowing members-only access to the files. We’re using Engaging.net’s PHPStringFun to perform some string manipulation such as regex find and replace.

In order to export membership data in a format usable locally within Excel or Microsoft Access, we used Andrew Weaver’s AJW Export. It allowed us to quickly write a custom SQL query and output into CSV format. To create the relationship between many members (bands and sponsors) and a single entry, a custom plugin and custom field types were created.

What difficulties did you encounter? How did you address them? Was there a particular add-on that got you out of a bind?

The first difficulty we encountered dealt with relating multiple members to a particular channel entry. For instance, an event could have one venue and many bands. We explored our options such as using Solspace’s User add-on but decided to create our own custom plugin with custom field types for handling these relationships.

The second and most difficult bind dealt with membership and subscription management. MO Blues wanted a new, automated system to replace their manual member management process. To save us time and our client money, we turned to Membrr by Electric Function. This enabled both fresh membership registration and online renewals for the MO Blues site.

 

Other Add-ons

Membrr

Company: Feisty Goat Interactive, LLC

Contact: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)