Waldorf Inspirations

Overview

This project was a redesign necessitated by the changing business requirements of the client. The original site design did not account for a number of factors, namely the quantity of assets needing to be navigated by users (over 1,000 free resources available).

Technologies Used

• Joomla! CMS
  • PHP MVC Architecture
• LiteSpeed web server
• MySQL
• Stripe Checkout
• AWS S3 for image and resource storage (via Linode Object Storage).

Features

• Product catalog with categories and filters
• Free educational resource repository hosting over 1,000 free resources for teachers
• User authentication and account management
• Shopping cart and checkout process
• Payment processing with Stripe
• Order history and tracking
• Admin dashboard for product and order management
• Digital products

Development Process

The development process was divided into several phases:

1. Requirements Gathering: Worked with the client to understand their specific needs, especially around managing downloadable resources, and eCommerce plans.
2. Frontend Development: Built the user interface using customized layouts in the Gantry Framework (gantry.org).
3. Testing and Deployment: Conducted thorough testing and deployed to production

Challenges and Solutions

The main challenge was creating an intuitive system to search and browse for educational resources. Using an established CMS with a mature ecosystem was a boon here. We settled on a system of tags and filters to reduce the need for resource duplication (we could upload a resource once, and apply both 1st and 2nd grade tags, for example). Our e-commerce library had some compatibility issues we had to overcome, slightly delaying the launch of this particular feature. The client decided to go ahead with a soft-launch without the e-commerce pieces enabled, and we are coming up on the launch of our phase 2 e-commerce build.

Results

The platform has launched and we are in phase 2 implementation, focusing on the build out of the e-commerce components. Overall the main challenge, managing over 1,000 downloadable resources works really well, and user feedback has been very positive.