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Extremely Customizable User Interface: The company intended to thoroughly re-brand itself in terms of images, layout, and color. Therefore, the CMS had to allow for absolute customizability on the front end.

Integrate with Web Services: The company interacts with its customers using the SalesForce CRM system, and it wanted all sales leads and customer feedback originating at the Website to flow directly into SalesForce, eliminating the delays of batch feeds or faxes. This meant that the CMS had to work well with Web services, which was essential to enable this business need.

Robust E-Commerce Modules: The CMS ideally would have prebuilt e-commerce modules that could be customized.

Support for Mashups: As a large chain offering many programs, the company needed a robust scheduling system that was able to communicate event calendars for every club. Building such a system in-house would have been extraordinarily expensive. Although there are several low-cost vendors that offer this functionality, integrating their system into the Website would have been unattractive and cumbersome. This meant that the CMS had to be able to provide mashup capabilities.

PHP/Java/.NET: Although they were flexible about the choice of a technology platform, the UI design partner was more comfortable with PHP as a means for quickly and flexibly building modular user interfaces.

CMS Evaluation
Based on these criteria, it was necessary to research CMS offerings. A shortlist of four was chosen based on market leadership: Drupal, Alfresco, Joomla, and Liferay. A review of articles on the Internet and internal tests resulted in the following conclusions:

Learning about Drupal
Following the review, Drupal was put through several Website implementations to determine its strengths and weaknesses. Those were determined to be:

Simplicity: Drupal’s standard version is quite easy to implement and move live, but extensive back-end customizations may require expert Drupal help that is available on Drupal forums … for a fee. The development team did not have prior experience working with Drupal, although it did underestimate the effort it takes to ramp up on the framework. It took about 40% more time than had been anticipated to get comfortable with the system. Once comfortable, though, a 30% savings in time/resources over building a purely custom Website should be realized.

Customizability: Despite initial concerns about the true customizability of the UI, this is actually rather easily achieved as Drupal works well in this regard.

Quick Implementation: Drupal provides a number of easily pluggable modules like those for ECommerce, SMTP email, blogs, news, and SSL. This facilitates quicker implementation and going live with a site, significantly cutting the time to develop, integrate and test the modules available in Drupal.

AJAX Support: The latest version of Drupal (v 5.2) was used for implementations, largely because of better support for AJAX and Content Construction Kit (CCK). The reason for this is that AJAX is used extensively on the Website – from dynamic form validations to enhancing the search with “recommend-as-you-type” functionality. CCK is also a very important feature of Drupal because it allows for custom content creation. Furthermore, Drupal offers a very robust role-based access-control system that is almost essential for any e-business system.

Flexibility: The creators of Drupal chose innovation over backward compatibility, which in turn gives it more flexibility. However, this can detract from the ease of customizing and maintaining Drupal sites. This could, therefore, require a dedicated and experienced team, which would make upgrading a site to a newer version of Drupal complicated and time-consuming.

Built-in Applications: Drupal has an exhaustive list of built-in applications like Blog, Chat, Classifieds, Contact Management, Data Entry, Discussion Forums, Document Management, Time Tracking, Weather etc.

Hosting Services: There are a number of Drupal hosting services available in the market that makes it easy for clients to go-live easily and quickly. This was a really nice feature of the Drupal ecosystem.

In the end, using Drupal for the SportsClub LA implementation proved to be a great experience, one that could be considered for other similarly sized projects. For more complex projects, Drupal might not fare as well, but due to its strong developer community and ever-growing market momentum it keeps getting consistently better and may prove itself to be of useful there as well.

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