Superloans

Web Industries built the Superloans site in Drupal 7, from scratch - with a completely new Drupal theme, and some Javascript to make it  snazzy. Plus, it's fully responsive, so adjusts to fit Smartphones and Tablet screens. But underlying the look and feel, there's some complex stuff going on in the background.

Javascript calculators

Superloans is in the business of making loans to its customers, and part of the brief was to take a set of loan amount and repayment spreadsheets, and represent them visually. If you'd like to have a read about how we did this in a bit more depth, then check out Joao's blog post here, where he gives a bit of an outline. From there, we applied some CSS to make them look a bit sexier and we were done.

New customer sign up

Superloans has a custom .Net customer management system that operates in each of its four stores. Part of our brief was to provide an online form allowing new customers to apply for a loan on the website. This was done using a custom SOAP module, that provided a form to collect the required information, validated it on submission, and then passed the data directly through to the .Net system.

TradeMe integration

Ok, now onto the really nitty-gritty stuff!

Superloans has four physical stores, and four corresponding TradeMe accounts. A (large) part of our brief was to create a function whereby each physical store could create and manage products they wanted to list on TradeMe from within an administrative area on the Superloans website.

This required a custom Drupal 7 module to:

• Allow us to work with the TradeMe API.
• Use OAuth to authenticate each of the different stores and let them push items through to their relevant TradeMe account.
• Create the relevant content types with the relevant fields included in a TradeMe auction item within the Drupal system.
• Create a TradeMe module administration area for Superadmin, allowing the input of API keys and management of several key options.
• Associated with this, was the use of Organic Groups to create a per-Store Dashboard, and restrict content access accordingly.

From a 'Store-user' perspective, they login to the site, and are presented with their Dashboard, where they can see all of their current Products, and push Products through to TradeMe - on doing so, they are presented with any errors, or a 'Success' message, at which point we also update the Product with the TradeMe reference number and a status. They can elect to work with a template rather than creating a Product from scratch, which contains all of the standard details for their common listing items, which they can then customise for their purposes.

Facebook Connect

With an increasing focus on Facebook, Superloans wanted to reduce the barriers to signing up to their site; so we used Drupal for Facebook to allow registration using a Facebook account. There's more Facebook work likely to be done over the coming months, so we'll update this accordingly.

There are heaps of other technical elements to this Drupal 7 system. As you'd expect with a system like this there were all sorts of minor customisations we had to make to get it perfect. If you are a Drupal person and interested in deployment, we used Features to work with multiple developers and their iterations, particularly in regards to the TradeMe integration work.