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Community contributions
The PayPal Subscriptions module was created and contributed to Drupal (https://www.drupal.org/project/paypal_subscriptions). An issue for the “Commerce claim gift aid” module was created, patched and has now been committed to the module. Existing issues were contributed to for the Search API Location and Geolocation modules.
Back in 1987, visionaries at the Countryside Commission pioneered the concept of a National Forest, a forested landscape that would bring all the benefits of trees and woodlands near to where people live and work. A competition was held to select the location for what would be the first forest to be created at scale in England for one thousand years. The area chosen to be the National Forest had suffered massively from the closure of the coal and clay industries in the mid-80s, and the landscape of the central area was crying out for regeneration and renewal.
Today, the National Forest is a regeneration success story, a green-print for a better way of life. In planting trees and thereby restoring a rich wildlife habitat to the area, it has provided a more sustainable and positive future for the next generation. It has boosted the local economy by creating jobs in the woodland and tourism industries. And in these stressful, tech-heavy times, there’s scientific proof that being around woodlands reduces stress and improves well-being. Best of all – everyone can benefit from it because 80% of the National Forest now has public access.
In 2018, Zoocha were selected to redesign and re-platform the National Forest website using Drupal.
About the project
Collectively re-aligning the National Forest online brand and portfolio of websites as one - to promote the National Forest and future proofing inline with their product roadmap:
- Migrate three sites to one single Drupal 8 CMS platform to modernise the architecture and provide ownership of the content to reduce development expense
- Create a method for online transactions to simultaneously collect donations and provide ecommerce functionality for shop products
- Create a search feature to enable users to explore the National Forest and plan their trip
- Allow users to book ‘Plant a tree’ experiences online and reduce the back office admin overhead
- Improve upon the limited editing capabilities and the high reliance on developer time to make updates
Why Drupal was chosen
Drupal was selected as the chosen CMS platform based on the following factors:
- Ease of use for non technical content managers/ editors
- Scalability
- Flexibility
- Security
- Widespread adoption, particularly in Government/ charity sector
- Ecommerce capability
- Integration with CRM system
- Accessibility
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Bootstrap Theme
The Bootstrap project provides a robust framework on which to build the site frontend. It is cross-browser compatible and provides a mobile-first responsive grid as well as other components that can be customised to fit the design brief.
The development team has extensive experience working with the Bootstrap framework and have customised the source CSS to only include the required elements, resulting in a more efficient and maintainable theme layer.
wkhtmltopdf
The wkhtmltopdf library allowed us to easily create PDFs from HTML on-the-fly. This was used to generate certificates for users who have planted trees at The National Forest using custom user entered text and information from their order.
PayPal Subscriptions
Unfortunately the Commerce PayPal module doesn’t allow for creating PayPal subscriptions so we created a module that does. It extends the Commerce PayPal module by creating a new payment gateway for the Express Checkout method.
This gives users the ability to set up regular donations, rather than just one-off donations, generating more income for The National Forest.
Search API / Solr / Search API Location / Geolocation
We used the Search API and Search API Solr modules to build advanced search for both the main site search and also the business listing search pages.
For the business listing search we extended the search functionality further to give users the ability to search from any location to find businesses within proximity to them.
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