Sunsail Yacht Charters

As one of the core team of Drupal developers, we provided not only front-end Drupal coding and theming resource but also some back-end assistance in the communications layer between the Drupal system and the US based marine and ticket reservation XML servers, mainly relating to low-level TCP/IP handling.

This is a big site. Loads of content across every conceivable type; downloadable PDF-s which can also be viewed on-line, email and newsletter subscriptions and management, video playback and much much more. This is one of the most complex sites we've ever seen in terms of not just implementation but also logical relationships between the various parts of the site.

Our personal involvement included developing the Special Offers, Goldmine integration, getting the online viewable PDF brochure system working, the date and prices search implementation and theming, (here: http://www.sunsail.co.uk/special-offers/clubs) and much much more in the course of a three-month contract period.

Once again, Drupal 6 proved more than capable of meeting the technical and logistical demands of implementing such a comlex site. We used many of the custom off-the-shelf modules as well as of course, the views module, taxonomy menus, node-queues and many more.

We also wrote a lot of custom stuff too to do with communicating with the XML servers based in the US; these were responsible for handling search requests from various parts of the site, to do with availabilities of specific types of boats on dates etc. You can see that in action here: http://www.sunsail.co.uk/destinations/caribbean/st-vincent-and-grenadines, the box in question being the Check Availability box at the top right of that page.

With the ability to take this kind of punishment and still come back asking for more it's no wonder that Drupal is going from strength-to-strength.