Drupal WebAPI Development

Hi all -

Sorry I'm chiming in to this so late today. Of course the one day I'm not on top of my Tessitura Forum emails, everyone is talking about my baby, www.smm.org!

If I could chant Drupal Drupal Drupal from the rooftops and tell everyone to use it, I would! It's really becoming mainstream. whitehouse.gov has been on Drupal for a couple years now, and many other US governent agencies have recently moved to Drupal. It's awesome to see an open source platform used in such big ways.

As an organization, the Science Museum of Minnesota has been using Drupal since its very early days. Specifically with our project-specific sites, including the award-winning Science Buzz website - www.sciencebuzz.org

I launched www.smm.org on Drupal back in spring 2007. I was a little rocky with it at first (and it has since come a long way), but now Drupal is in my blood and I will never look back. Shortly after, we chose Tessitura for our organization. Here's an overview of what we've done online with Tessitura and Drupal:

Online Ticketing System - Launched: April 2008
https://www.smm.org/tickets/buy
We went live with Tessitura in January 2008 and had hoped to be live online at that same time; that didn't happen, but we have now been online with ticketing for about 2.5 years. We had originally hoped to have online ticketing more fully integrated with Drupal, but we were under a time crunch and pretty much all of the "Tessitura Approved Web Developers" code in .Net/ASP and Drupal is all PHP. As newbies to Tessitura ourselves, we wanted to work with someone who was experienced with the Tessitura API rather than a Drupal developer. Therefore we selected Commercial Media to write our online ticketing system for us; they were willing to code it in PHP. While our ticketing system is technically part of our Drupal site, the code is all in a static place on our web server and the Drupal pages simply use PHP includes to pull in the ticketing code.

Online Class & Camp Registration System - Launched: January 2009
https://www.smm.org/classes/catalog
We had a bit more lead time with this project, and we had a bit of a rocky experience with the ticketing implementation, so we looked for a new development firm. We felt strongly that we wanted this Class Registration system to be integrated more tightly with our Drupal site. We chose Gorton Studios - a local Drupal development shop - to help us with this. Their team is highly active in the Drupal community, and their lead developer has written some of the most popular contributed modules in Drupal. With the guidance from our senior web developer (no longer with us) and our database admins, they were able to quickly learn the Tessitura API and we're extremely happy with the end result. Gorton Studios also does web design and development for the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis (another Tessitura licensee with a Drupal site), although I think they did the same thing we did and chose Commercial Media for their online ticketing.

Current / Future Projects:
- We're in the final stages of implementing WordFly (we're not using a Tessitura-integrated email system currently), and we're just finishing up development of new Drupal modules to handle enewsletter subscriptions and basic Tessitura account management.
- We're about to begin a huge project with Gorton Studios to completely overhaul our online ticketing, membership, and donation systems - all fully integrated in Drupal with custom modules. And - fingers crossed - we hope to do this in Tessitura Next Generation!

THE IMPORTANT STUFF:

- We're starting to get more and more questions about sharing of the code. To be honest, I need to due some research and work with our internal museum team, our partners at Gorton Studios, and the Tessitura Network before I can give more detail about the sharing of code. We're all for the open source part of Drupal, but I want to make sure all 3 parties are in agreement before I proceed. It is true, as the drupal.org post says, that we did get some pushback originally about sharing all this code. But it's been a while since it's been discussed.
- In the meantime, as you can tell, I'm very proud of the work we've done integrating Tessitura with Drupal, and I'd be happy to answer any questions about our successes. My direct contact info is below.

Thanks for reading!
Eric

Eric Mueller
Webmaster & Social Media Guy
Science Museum of Minnesota

Email: emueller@smm.org
Phone: (651) 221-9455

Powered by Drupal.

Oh, and one last thing. Just found out a few hours ago that I'm going to the Tessitura Conference this year. Woohoo!

Which means I'll also be presenting on Drupal and the successes we've had with Drupal + Tessitura.

See you in Orlando!

Eric Mueller
Webmaster & Social Media Guy
Science Museum of Minnesota

Email: emueller@smm.org
Phone: (651) 221-9455

Powered by Drupal.

Thanks for all the info, Eric, and i'm glad you found your way to this post!!!

First off, I think its important to be clear that my intentions were never to try to get SMM to reveal their code, necessarily.  But, if you did the proper asking, and everyone was cool with it, then by all means!

I've also come to know a number of developers who swear by drupal, and to know that there has been at least 1 highly successful integration done, is optimistic to say the least.  The more I think about this project coming to reality, the further i think we could take it.  Ideally, setting up the proper collaboration tools to do so.

I'm glad to hear your support for the project, and i hope to contact you soon to discuss further.

So, Is there anyone else who would be interested in this collaboration?

James 

Some Drupal - Tessitura integration is on our radar for the Yale web sites.  Although we don't have it scheduled in the immediate project to-do list.  Always happy to learn more about any progress people make in this direction.

Cool Randall!  Maybe you could join us in our next SNET User Group meeting?  are you part of the SNET group within the Forum?  It has been way under utilized, but this topic could stir up plenty of conversation.  FTC is right in downtown Fairfield as well. 

I hope to be making some progress in the near future, but as you probably know, it can be a process.  I happen to be a 1 man show when it come to all things technical at FTC, which makes progress even more sporadic.

James

Just an update here, from my other thread regarding collaboration;

From Kristin Tigart:

"Collaborating on code ideas/ practices is a great idea!  That's what the Network community is all about, right?  We just ask that it happen within the bounds of the Network and not out in the public domain.  So we'd be glad to set up a special group on the site or a new forum to house discussions and collaboration if that would be immediately useful.

With a longer time frame, we are just beginning to work on a developer collaboration portion of the TessituraNetwork.com site which would allow code sharing and provide a place for external developers to easily find information about Tessitura that's relevant for them to do their work.  More on this in the coming months.

Thanks for the good topic!"

Its good to see that some people are interested.  I'm gonna get back with Kristin about setting up a Group for the immediate time being!

Thanks.
 James

Just an update here, from my other thread regarding collaboration;

From Kristin Tigart:

"Collaborating on code ideas/ practices is a great idea!  That's what the Network community is all about, right?  We just ask that it happen within the bounds of the Network and not out in the public domain.  So we'd be glad to set up a special group on the site or a new forum to house discussions and collaboration if that would be immediately useful.

With a longer time frame, we are just beginning to work on a developer collaboration portion of the TessituraNetwork.com site which would allow code sharing and provide a place for external developers to easily find information about Tessitura that's relevant for them to do their work.  More on this in the coming months.

Thanks for the good topic!"

Its good to see that some people are interested.  I'm gonna get back with Kristin about setting up a Group for the immediate time being!

Thanks.
 James

Randall, Andrea and anyone else;  we now have a Web Developer Group!

http://www.tessituranetwork.com/COMMUNITY/groups/web_developer_group/default.aspx

Hey folks,

I started a fresh thread on the subject over here, in the Web Dev group.  We're beginning to develop our Drupal site....

http://www.tessituranetwork.com/COMMUNITY/groups/web_developer_group/forum/p/5347/17101.aspx#17101

James