Creative Carers

Creative Carers is an organisation supporting carers via a range of services and activities.

Project overview

The brief was for a new website that would support carers in finding relevant information, and allow members to register, sign in and book activities.

A fully integrated website was requested with the membership functionality, alongside the content management system with frequently updated content.

We built a Drupal 7, responsive website. Built with custom sub-theme extended from Bootstrap base theme. Member registration form and activity booking system with events that have recurring events.

Why Drupal was chosen

Drupal was chosen as it easily handles user registration, and allows you to book activities once you have an account. It was chosen as the best CMS for the client as it can be customised to be very easy to administer by non-technical content editors, which is especially important for non-profit organisations such as Creative Carers.

WordPress was considered but not for long as lots of the functionality we wanted was baked into Drupal core rather than having to rely on lots of plug-ins.

Project goals, requirements and outcome

The site allows visitors to sign up as members, and once registered they are able to book activities. Members and site administrators are able to manage existing bookings and cancel reservations & book on behalf of others. Site administrators are also able to schedule email reminders and send ad-hoc email messages to all attendees of an activity should the need arise.

It has been customised to be very easy to administer by non-technical content editors, which is especially important for non-profit organisations such as Creative Carers.

There are additional improvements coming over the next months.

Technical details - Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen

• Entity Registration satisfied the criteria of allowing members need to login and register attendance for various different activities. It was chosen due to the large community support behind it and fact it is being used on many other Drupal sites worldwide.
• FullCalendar was chosen as it allowed an intuitive Activities Calendar http://www.creative-carers.org/activities/calendar
• We decided to use Bootstrap and build a custom sub-theme was chosen as it allowed us to have a great head start and also make the website responsive more easily and in less time.
• Context was chosen as the site has multiple different sections. It allows us to have different blocks to be displayed on different sections, and also vary the colour for different site sections (by inserting Theme HTML).
• Menu Per Role was chosen to allow different menu items to be shown for anonymous & authenticated users.
• Profile 2 was chosen to allow easy management of user profile fields used on the new member registration form.
• Views UI Basic was chosen to allow easy editing of view headers by content editors, without the complicated UI of Views or exposing any non-desirable settings to be changed.

See our Drupal.org case study