The DentaQuest Partnership
Learn how Thinkbean took The DentaQuest Partnership's existing Drupal site to the next level.
From migration and strategy, to design and development.
The DentaQuest Partnership was looking for a team of Drupal specialists who could take their custom web application to the next level.
Read below to discover how Thinkbean provided strategy, design and development solutions as well as created a long lasting partnership.
The Challenge
The DentaQuest Partnership was looking for a team of Drupal specialists who could take their existing Drupal site to the next level. Their site is a very custom web application which revolves around their clients' member groups.
The first priority items were:
- Reduce page load times for both anonymous and logged-in users.
- Move from the Moodle Learning Management System (LMS) to a more tightly integrated and flexible solution.
- Create notification emails for group members based on their chosen notification preference.
The Strategy
We started by migrating the site to the Acquia Cloud Platform, a high performance and dedicated Drupal hosting company. We setup and configured an aggressive caching strategy including Memcache, Varnish, and native Drupal performance optimizations.
We created a custom LMS based around the sco_node contrib module. This allows site administrators to upload a SCORM object via a single form which creates the online learning course for site members. We also built out an array of user-specific reports as well as administrative reporting tools.
We customized a suite of contributed modules and hand crafted a batch of our own custom modules to create a very flexible notification system which allows full administrative global controls and user-specific settings. This needed to be extendable to handle new trigger events, new groups of users, and changing notification preference settings.
The Result
Performance gains have been massive! Anonymous users are seeing pages load nearly four times faster and site members are seeing pages load over twice as fast.
The custom Learning Management System allows users to enroll in a class, complete the online learning module at their own pace, take a quiz, and receive a grade and printable certificate. We also bulk imported the legacy data so there was a seamless hand-off from the old Moodle LMS to the new custom Drupal LMS.
The notification system which we built out is sweet! It allows site administrators to set default behaviors and individual users to customize their specific preferences. A user can now opt in/out of a group discussion and choose if and how they want to receive their notifications; immediate email, daily digest, weekly digest, or no notification at all. The content which is created in these closed groups is highly specific and targeted and now each member can get updated as and when they choose to stay up-to-date with the latest developments. The emails look very pretty too :)
The best result of all is we get to work with an absolutely amazing client on really cool, custom stuff - a perfect match!
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