Fareshare UK
May 12, 2015In 2014 I was in a few calls with Fareshare to help them scope out and get their volunteer registration system built. I was sadly not able to help them with the build, but I was able to advise remotely. This ultimately led to a call this year where they wanted to extend the app they had already built to add some new functionality, and get a few of the teething issues resolved from the previous campaign.
CMS/Perch Integration
The one main piece of work they required me to look at was to get a CMS integrated into their system. Now, whilst I may be a Drupal developer, that tool was not a great fit to retrofit into an MVC application, so along came Perch, which I had heard from some other colleagues, and was eager to try out. After some testing and scoping, it was decided that we would use Perch to add the CMS capabilities. Once we started using Perch, we quickly found it could then be used to add some of the other functionality which was required. For example the client wanted the ability to export reports in a csv format, which could be done with some nice (read complex) SQL pivot tabling, and exporting to physical files with some nice security on reduce hackers accessing the data. But the icing on the cake was the UI which I could use perch for, largely because it meant the client had one login to handle, and from there they could do everything they needed to, rather than having to login in to multiple systems.
Mandrill
One other extra the client wanted was the ability to edit their email outside of the application and also look at the stats tools like MailChimp give them. Whilst Mailchimps licencing means it is not usable for transactional emails, it's API system, Mandrill, was superb for this job. Sadly the framework the site was built on was old, and the old apps didn't work, so I had to modify it to allow us to use the mandrill API, but once done, and few sections were fixed/modified, we had a lovely email system setup.