Update : Feb 6, 2009.
Cariblife Central has defaulted in payment.

Sheldon Mundle, CEO of Cariblife has informed in November 2008 that EIGS CaribLife Inc had already filed for bankruptcy. But as of this update Sheldon has not been able to provide Bankruptcy Number. He has requested many extensions to dates and including giving false assurances that he will personally make a vsit to state office and file in bankruptcy, but till date he has not lived upto his word and has defaulted in payments.

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Hi Friends...

Another case study and it seems that i am getting more and more predictable. A blog and a case study... i think this has been happening... but i promise that i will change things from now onwards... A case study would now be followed by 2 blogss..hehehe... kiddin... The case-study in question is Cariblifecentral. Openkick - A division of Gloscon was involved in the development of Cariblifecentral - a Community site for the Caribbean community living in different parts of the world.

Cariblifecentral was a very interesting project since it involved lot of mash-ups of different sites and applications. Apart from the knowledge of working on mashups the team at Openkick had a very good experience of working on a community website that had a real marketing push coming through different channels such as Ning Networking Platform, Facebook etc.

Case Study of Cariblifecentral

Purpose
The primary purpose of Carib Life Central is to connect you with Caribbean people or products for social and business purposes. If you have Caribbean interests and a love for the lifestyle of the Caribbean then we encourage you to register in order to gain access to updates on Caribbean Arts, News, Sports, Recipes or information about each country.

Cariblifecentral is targeted towards the Caribbean-American students, professionals and people interested in the Caribbean lifestyle. Cariblifecentral will provide Caribbean-Americans with networking services, events and lifestyle driven information that is relevant, cheap and useful.

Background
Cariblifecentral was an existing site built in HTML with a PHPMyDirectory application already integrated with the site. Cariblifecentral was already on Ning Network and also had an e-shop at Cafepress. But this was not enough to involve the target audience into the site as there was little that the community can contribute to it. Also the look and feel of the site was not in sync with the caribbean feel.

New Cariblifecentral Website
A new site for Cariblifecentral was planned that envisioned to promote the real "Caribbean" and bring its people who have settled around the world closer to it. It was very important to include content that was relevant and at the same time suitable to the target audience.

A need was also felt of a Content Management System that could provide the flexibility to easily upload content minus the prerequisite to know a programming language. Also there was a need for a highly scalable and modular CMS that could be easily migrated to the latest version and any new features can be easily added to it. Cariblifecentral was also planned to move to the new MOSSO environment.

The Relaunch
Its relaunch due this September 2008, will see a very new Cariblifecentral with many more features than the earlier site. The new site is planned of having some of the latest community features such as Comments, RSS Feeds, Syndication, Open ID, Newsletters.

Another important functionality that was supposed to be added was of Zvents & OpenX into the site. Zvents provides localised information on Events, Venues & Performances that are happening around the area in which the site has been browsed.

The website Carib Life Central is a mashup site with a number of third party integrations such as:

1.Ning Network - For Interacting with the network of Cariblifecentral at Ning
2.Cafepress - For accessing the merchandise which is present at the Cariblife Shop on Cafepress
3.Zvents - Displaying events based on the area in which the site is browsed upon.
4.PHP My Directory - Providing information on
5.Linkedin Network (Future Enhancements)
6.OpenX for serving Ads from Google as well as local Advertisers Ads

Some other critical requirements of the project were:
1.Use of Recipe module in Drupal to provide information on Recipes
2.Use of IP to Country module for Zvents
3.Use of Brightcove player for displaying Video Advertisements on the site
4.Multi-lingual site with languages as French & Spanish
5.RSS feeds from different sites for the News section of the site
6.Search through Job Classifieds by Country and Category
7.Information regarding Country Facts
8.Search among different charities on the basis of Country and Category
9.Cross Browser friendly site which is compliant to IE 7.0, FF 2.0 & 3.0, Safari 2.0

Important Aspects of Cariblifecentral

News
CaribLifeCentral was built to connect every one from all nationalities and backgrounds who love the Caribbean lifestyle and culture. Taking this theme forward the New Cariblifecentral was planned to provide more and more information about the Caribbean.

News automatically became a very important feature of the new site since the targeted segement i.e. Caribbean-American students, professionals would like to know more about the Carribean. The News is collected from a variety of sources and is categorized into 5 types: Caribbean News, Entertainment News, Business News, Sports News and Op-Editorials. Except Op-Editorials all the news in these categories were collected through RSS feeds via different sources.

The News fetched from different sources were to be sorted by date with each feed displaying the source name and the time stamp. The feeds were also supposed to be sorted with upto only 10 days of news and pagination be also provided at the end of the page.

A News block was also provided on the home page which would collect the latest top 2 news reports from each of the categories i.e. Caribbean, Entertainment, Business, Sports and Op-Editorials. Jquery was used to meet the requirement of switching between news in this block.

OpenX
The Cariblifecentral site chose OpenX instead of using Advertise module of Drupal as OpenX was giving more flexibility and features to choose frome. OpenAds module present in Drupal was used for integration of OpenX with Drupal. OpenX makes it very easy for a publisher to manage their Ads which could be both Google Ads as well as custom Ads. OpenX could also handle the functionality of pop-up ads as well displaying multiple ads in one region at a time.

Integration of OpenX with Drupal was done through OpenAds module where we created publisher ID and created multiple zones to make the different ads display in different areas of the site.

Zvents
Zvents is a third party tool that provides localized information on a site users area with respect to local events, performances etc. Apart from the themeing of the page for Zvents, IP to country module was configured so that the IP of the user can be used to provide a list of events happening in the user's area.

Advertisement tags were provided to Zvents in order to display Cariblifecentral's Ads in the Zvents area of the site.

PHPMyDirectory
PHPMyDirectory is a powerful, full-featured and secure business directory which was integrated with the new Cariblifecentral site. Themeing and initial configuration of PHPMydirectory was done with the new site.

Cafepress
Cariblifecentral has an online store with Cafepress which diplays a number of items. Each of these items have a unique id which is shared with Drupal, and when clicked on the block enabled for Cafepress, would lead to that item.
The Cafepress Module was enabled for using the shop of Cariblifecentral which was at Cafepress. The module enabled the user to see different items kept on the store and go directly to that item on the Cafepress store.

Brightcove player
Video Ads were one of the requirements to be implemented on the new Cariblifecentral site. This was supposed to be achieved through Brightcove player which in turn was done by embedded field module.
Customization of the size of the brightcove player was done as per the specs. Cariblifecentral was assigned a channel id which was unique for the site and would fetch only those videos which were assigned this channel id.

Content Types

Business Features
Title - Name of the Company featured
Description - Description of the company
Cateogories - Category to which the Business belongs to
Images - Node Reference to images/logos of the business mentioned. You can also put a title on the image.

Business Classifieds
Title - Title of the Job
City - Name of the city where the job is located
Contact Number / Name / Email - Contact details for the Job
Body - Classifieds Body
Category (Taxonomy)-
Country - Country for which the job is offered for
Job Type - Type of the Job
Image - Images related to the job can be uploaded along with the Image Title.

Charity
Title - Title of the Charity
Images - Image related to the charity. More than one image can uploaded for a single charity
Name - Name of the charity
Description - Details of the charity, Introduction and any relevant material for the charity
Categories

Charities - Type of Charity
Country - Country for which the charity belongs to
Location - Name of the city where the charity is present
Contact Email / Number / Website - Contact details for Charity

Country Facts
Introduction - Introduction of country
Flag - Flag of country

Background - Background of country
Category -
Country - Country
Attached images - For map

Recipes

Title - Title of the Recipe

Body - Content of the recipe

Arts & Living
Title - Title of article
Body - Content of article
Image attachment - Image can be attached along with the content

Contributed Modules

Ad:- Used for homepage lifestyle block.
Openx Adserver Integration:- Used for integration with openx.
Embededmedia field:- Used for Brightcove video.
Image CCK:- For image field.
Category:- To structure and categorize content.
Cafepress:- To integrate with cafepress store.
Aggregator:- Used for getting feed from external site.(Core module)
Image and Image Attach:- Used for image attach with particular node.
I18n ,internationalization and translation:- For translation data into other language.
Node profile:- To save user profile as node.
Classified Ads:- Used for business Classifieds.
Flash Node:- To upload flash data.
Legal:- Used for terms and condition during create an account.
Logintoboggan:- Used for limiting password length and login with e-mail address. It is also used for redirecting user to node profile page.
Modr8:- To moderate content.
Mollom:- Protect against spam. Use instead of CAPTCHA.
Node as block:- To create a block of node.
OpenID:- Allows Drupal to act as an Open ID relying party.
Poormanscron:- To run cron.php at specified interval.
Printer Friendly Pages:- For printing pages.
Quick tabs:- For homepage tabs block.
Recipe:- For recipe content.
Username AJAX Check:- For checking username availability.
Views:- To create customized view of node list.
Fivestar and Voting API:- For rating node.

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I hope that this case study will give you a better idea of our development expertise and how we have experience in implementing high end websites with a very simple framework called Drupal.

Cheers!!!

Rajat