Kiwi Karma

Overview

Kiwi Karma, apart from anything, is a cool idea! For each night's accommodation you book with a registered hotel, Kiwi Karma passes on a donation to a charity of your choice - with no extra cost to you. Web Industries helped work this project through from a concept to a real-life website and business. We've subsequently done a major re-development since the original site, which includes:

• Migration from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7
• A revamped theme and home page
• Work with the Bookit system, to provide an accommodation search form, which returns results from Bookit

In essence, it's a simple concept, and the site supports that. It's easy to navigate and use, and very pleasing on the eye!

Due to a change in the business model, we ended up removing the functionality, but one of the nerdier and more complex areas of the original development was a Drupal-to-Xero integration. When creating a contact in the Drupal system, we automatically checked an associated Xero account to see if the contact already existed - if it didn't we created one. Then, each month, we created an invoice within Kiwi Karma and then automatically pushed these through to Xero to make life easier. So, if you have a shopping cart and want it integrated with your Xero account, it can be done!

“Web Industries helped us take an idea for a new online business and work it through to a real life website – Kiwikarma.co.nz. There were heaps of changes to the specification as we went along, and the guys were always honest and direct about the potential implications of each decision.

They were highly flexible, made some complex stuff seem really easy, and helped us build a Drupal system that is going to make a huge impact over the next few years!”

Craig Crestani
Kiwi Karma

Challenges

• Working through the various stages in Kiwi Karma's evolution. As a start up, the business has had to adjust it's model, and therefore the supporting web system - but that has been part of the fun!
• Ensuring a nice clean transition between the Kiwi Karma system and the Bookit system driving the availability and booking system; this was predominately a design and theming challenge.