Firestorm just went to the next level, learn how it took a village to raise this website.
We've been working with Firestorm Business Networking for a few years now. When we first started all they had was an iWeb template and a few animated GIFs. I kid, I kid... mostly. As in most projects on a budget you have to develop in phases as time and money permits, myfirestorm.com was no different.
Phase 1
We worked with, then new owner of Firestorm, Phil Pelto to create a visually improved design with some basic user management, event and signup features. While this got us by, the ever growing Firestorm quickly outgrew it's capablities. The good ship had served us well, but her days were numbered.
Phase 2 - We can rebuild it, we have the technology
Starting in November of 2010 we met behind closed doors with open minds and began brain storming, what would the new site look like? What would it do? What do our users want? What do they need? With whiteboards at the ready we put a plan in place over the next few months to build more than just a website; a whole system of open source projects working together to truly be more than the sum of the whole, syngery was oozing everywhere.
Challenges
We settled on a mix of Drupal for the base system and leveraged CiviCRM's event planning and member services for the rest. While CiviCRM has tight integration with Drupal, it was not without challenges. One of the moore glaring was CiviCRM's primary job is to work with members and an organization, we needed it to work not only vertically but horizontally as well, in a member to member sense. Our resident Drupal Guru Isaac Neibeling single handedly fixed undocumented bugs, contributed fixes back to source and willed the two systems to work.
Core Features
- Member to Member Referrals
- Referral Leader Baords (the social game aspect)
- Business Profiles
- Event RSVPs
- Membership renewals / monthly / yearly
- Chapter hubs
- Discission topics
- Meeting Topics
- iCal Feeds (push to outlook calendaring)
- And plenty of more top secret things we are sworn to protect
So another chapter ends, so another begins
As in any project of this size and scope we hit roadblocks, sometimes plowing through or building around, in any case we kept moving forward and are prooud to announce, the new, the improved, the cranked to 11 myfirestorm.com
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