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Rainforest Alliance's Global Impact Map.

Processes
  • Agile/Kanban
  • XP
Team Leadership
  • Senior Producer
    Kelly Albrecht
  • Senior Development
    Tom Fleming

Rainforest Alliance needed an effective way to illustrate their global efforts to preserve one of the earth’s most valuable resources: the environment.

Most recently impressive is the mapping project that we unexpectedly threw on Rob and Tom’s lap, and which they handled quickly and expertly. 

Melissa Normann, Senior Manager, Web Strategy and Development

How we did it

Knowing that a simple page with paragraphs wouldn’t suffice, we built a map that allows the Rainforest Alliance to display data from a specific region. The user can then zoom in on those regions or look at specific data points to learn more. The map takes a large spreadsheet of geodata, created based on information from the Rainforest Alliance’s CRM, and creates an interactive map powered by CartoDB that allows users to see RA-certified organizations, and what they do.

The project took less than a month to complete, using a combination of Kanban and XP management processes.

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Leveraging our Scaffolding and Drupal 8.

Processes
  • Agile/Scrum
  • Continuous Delivery
Team Leadership

Since early 2014, LCM has continued a productive, ongoing partnership with Chicken Soup for the Soul, and supports their web properties and the associated infrastructure. Recently, Chicken Soup asked LCM to launch two new and completely different Drupal 8 sites within a month. LCM worked off of prototypes from Chicken Soup for the Soul and was trusted to move quickly. By deploying two separate teams of 2 developers, LCM was able to take each site from prototype to launch on D8 and Pantheon within two weeks, while another team maintained the ongoing feature release schedule on Chicken Soup for the Soul’s massive Drupal 6 site.

In June of 2016, Chicken Soup needed a simple site for their rapidly-growing television and online programming production and distribution business. The site needed to handle a collection of content pages and videos, and was intended to be another microsite that would follow some standard templating and functionality as laid out for previous Chicken Soup sites LCM had worked on, and new sites that were still to come.

Chicken Soup was looking for an alternative approach.

Building new features to support growing business lines inside their massive aging Drupal 6 site was becoming unsustainable. Over time, the site had accumulated so much functionality that each deployment ran a high risk of breaking something, which led to lengthy deployments. Recognizing that issue, a plan was developed in partnership with Chicken Soup for the Soul to spin out a series of smaller, more focused sites sharing a similar architecture. Drupal’s modular architecture, and particularly Drupal 8’s approach to dependency management, made it a great fit for this task. Additionally, while the core CMS functionality of Drupal 6 worked well, the UI was becoming dated and cumbersome to work with. Drupal 8 featured a lot of usability enhancements, such as the built in WYSIWYG, that would make the site much more usable overall. Finally, the feature set of the site was tightly focused, and after consideration, we were able to implement it with a small handful of contributed modules, and very little technical debt. 

Following on the success of the Chicken Soup for the Soul Pet Foods site, Last Call Media used a similar formula: leverage Drupal 8 core wherever possible, and avoid contributed modules. This was a great strategy in terms of avoiding the turmoil of early Drupal 8 contrib churn, and had the side benefit of keeping the site very lean and performant. After experiencing some past pain points in using the bare “Configuration Management” system in Drupal 8, we chose to use the Features module on this project. Features makes it easy to bundle configuration into modules, and makes it easier to share configuration (in the form of Drupal modules) between the brand’s sites should the need arise in the future. 

The site uses Last Call Media’s boilerplate Drupal 8 scaffolding build, which helped jumpstart the development process by providing a suite of best practices and quality assurance tools with no extra effort.

The goal of this project was to build a flexible marketing site capable of showcasing Chicken Soup for the Soul’s entertainment offerings; primarily their TV shows and online videos. The biggest obstacles the project faced were the looming deadline, the relative instability of Drupal 8 immediately following the initial release, and the lack of contributed modules that were available to us. For example, the Media-related modules we would normally use for the online video section were not stable yet. Instead of using a media/file entity as we normally would to store an online video, we leveraged Drupal core’s new URL field to store the URL of the Rumble video, and used a field template to output an embed link. It was a simple and elegant solution to a difficult problem. 

Thanks to excellent communication with Chicken Soup for the Soul’s Digital Strategy team, and Last Call’s experience in working with Drupal 8, we were able to turn the project around in just two weeks. This met the deadline set by the marketing team, and achieved all of the goals that were set out. 

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Pet food microsite, built in two weeks.

Processes
  • Agile/Scrum
  • Continuous Delivery
Team Leadership

Since early 2014, LCM has continued a productive, ongoing partnership with Chicken Soup for the Soul, and supports their web properties and the associated infrastructure. Recently, Chicken Soup asked LCM to launch two new and completely different Drupal 8 sites within a month. LCM worked off of prototypes from Chicken Soup for the Soul and was trusted to move quickly. By deploying two separate teams of 2 developers, LCM was able to take each site from prototype to launch on D8 and Pantheon within two weeks, while another team maintained the ongoing feature release schedule on Chicken Soup for the Soul’s massive Drupal 6 site.

In June of 2016, Chicken Soup needed a simple site to promote their line of wholesome pet food and message of overall health and wellbeing for dogs and cats. The site needed to handle a collection of content pages for products and species, as well as a store locator to show users where their products are available. The Chicken Soup Pet Foods site is a microsite that follows standard D8 templating and functionality, as laid out for previous Chicken Soup sites LCM has completed, and new sites that are still to come.

Chicken Soup was looking for an alternative approach.

Building new features to support growing business lines inside their massive aging Drupal 6 site was becoming unsustainable. Over time, the site had accumulated so much functionality that each deployment ran a high risk of breaking something, which led to lengthy deployments. Recognizing that issue, a plan was developed in partnership with Chicken Soup for the Soul to spin out a series of smaller, more focused sites sharing a similar architecture. Drupal’s modular architecture, and particularly Drupal 8’s approach to dependency management, made it a great fit for this task. Additionally, while the core CMS functionality of Drupal 6 worked well, the UI was becoming dated and cumbersome to work with. Drupal 8 featured a lot of usability enhancements, such as the built-in WYSIWYG, that would make the site much more usable overall. Finally, the feature set of the site was tightly focused, and after consideration, we were able to implement it with a small handful of contributed modules, and very little technical debt. 

After experiencing some past pain points in using the bare “Configuration Management” system in Drupal 8, we chose to use the Features module on this project. Features makes it easy to bundle configuration into modules, and makes it easier to share configuration (in the form of Drupal modules) between the brand’s sites should the need arise in the future. The site uses Last Call Media’s boilerplate Drupal 8 “scaffolding” tool, which produces an artifact build, and provides a lot of best practices and testing tools out of the box. Other than that, we worked hard to use as much of the core D8 functionality as we possibly could to reduce our future technical debt as contributed modules matured.

The goal of this project was to build a flexible marketing site capable of showcasing Chicken Soup for the Soul’s line of pet food products, promoting the retailers that sell those products, and building flexible pages containing multimedia content. The biggest obstacles the project faced were the looming deadline, the relative instability of Drupal 8 immediately following the initial release, and the lack of contributed modules that were available to us. For example, the Addressfield/Geofield modules we would normally use for the “Find a Retailer” feature were unavailable to us, and we were forced to get creative. We ended up using Google’s Fusion Tables as a datasource, with some javascript to embed the data on the page and provide the interactivity. Overall, this was a great tradeoff, since it allows us to offload the import/edit UI and the proximity to a third party, whereas the old solution required building a custom importer to bring a CSV into Drupal, and a number of slow spatial queries to be made against the database.

Thanks to excellent communication with Chicken Soup for the Soul’s Digital Strategy team, and Last Call’s experience in working with Drupal 8, we were able to turn the project around in just two weeks. This met the deadline set by the marketing team, and achieved all of the goals that were set out. 
 

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Continuous delivery to HIAS.

Processes
  • Continuous Delivery
Team Leadership
  • Senior Producer
    Kelly Albrecht
  • Senior Development
    Tom Fleming
  • Art Director
    Colin Panetta

Last Call Media kicked off our relationship with HIAS, the oldest international migration and refugee resettlement agency in the U.S., with a Design and Development Audit. We’ve used our findings from that task to inform strategies and recommendations for both immediate goals and long term projects.

LCM has been assisting HIAS with site-wide User Experience and Design improvements, with services including card sorting exercises, site navigation strategy, and overall recommendations and prototyping.

Additionally, we’ve provided new feature development, such as adding Events listing and browsing capabilities.

We also provide ongoing support to maintain their existing Drupal, WordPress, and other PHP web systems.
 

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Continuous enablement.

Processes
  • Continuous Delivery
Team Leadership
  • Senior Producer
    Kelly Albrecht

On September 1, Haverford relaunched their homepage with some great new features including:

  • Revised site-wide navigation
  • Seriously upgraded search function
  • Enhanced user menu to help users get to resources they need easily
     

Haverford’s in-house communications and development teams executed all of these changes. Last Call Media wants to send them an enthusiastic congratulations on a job well done!

This is an enormous success story for Last Call Media. When I saw this, it was the realization of one of the major goals of our project with Haverford, which was to enable them to to build the foundation of a Drupal environment that allows Haverford to leverage a CMS to manage their site, rather than relying on custom templates that can only be updated by the web team.

Back in December of 2014, when LCM got the call from Haverford about redoing their site in Drupal, I thought it was going to be a redesign.

Haverford didn’t need a redesign; their site looked great already. The biggest issue they needed to solve was not having enough time to do new feature development themselves. The recent enhancements in this Homepage overhaul were the results we were hoping for!

Since then, Last Call Media has continued to work with Haverford on an ongoing basis as part of our dedicated Continuous Delivery relationship, where our dedicated team of developers helps to keep their site secure, up-to-date, and assists as needed with anything from strategy to design to development.

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NYSE Euronext.

Processes
  • Agile/Scrum
  • Continuous Delivery
Team Leadership

Providing team augmentation to the New York Stock Exchange

Demonstrated extensive knowledge of Drupal, PHP, MYSQL… contribution to the codebase proved to be complete and accurate… took the initiative to find the root cause of the problems …dependable part of the team… we have been very pleased.

Debnath Mondel, New York Stock Exchange

How we did it

We embedded our expertise into a very large undertaking to assist a variety of needs.

NYSE Euronext needed to migrate from two legacy systems to a single modern content management system with a rebranded, new look and feel. The project was massive and LCM was brought in to round out internal teams with our expertise.

Engagement included working with in-house developers and other development teams to migrate their legacy systems to Drupal sites, as well as to build required new sites, including a custom blogging platform.

NYSE Euronext’s euronext.com website now redirects to the new Drupal sites.

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Disrupting the storage industry.

Processes
  • Continuous Delivery
Team Leadership
  • Senior Producer
    Kelly Albrecht
  • Senior Architect
    Kelly Albrecht

All College Storage had an idea for a brand new online business. They wanted students from a university to be able to schedule the pickup, storage, and delivery of their dorm items over the summer. Items would be picked up at the students old dorm, then delivered to the new dorm at a requested date and time.

In addition to a full branding treatment, we developed a solution for students to reserve and configure when and where their items would be picked up and delivered.

An iPad point of sale interface was also developed for employees to process payment for each customer during pickup time as well as to manage all business workflow. All College Storage soon became the premier moving and storage solution for students in Western Mass.

The business was a success from day one, soon expanding from five colleges to eleven colleges and four prep schools, and it continues to succeed and expand.

Following this model, LCM assisted All College Inc. in replicating the successes with All College Storage to another startup for laundry service, called All College Laundry.

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Consulting and continuous delivery.

Processes
  • Continuous Delivery
Team Leadership
  • Senior Development
    Tom Fleming

Last Call Media pursues work that we feel good about. We engage institutions in the artistic, education, and nonprofit sectors because we believe in what they do. CreativeGround, a product of the New England Foundation for the Arts (NEFA), was exactly the kind of partner LCM wanted to have, and they just happened to be in the market for a new partner when we met them.

How we did it

CreativeGround is a free online directory of profiles for cultural nonprofits like libraries and theaters, creative businesses like recording studios and design agencies, and artists of all disciplines. They came to LCM looking to escape a pattern that many organizations find themselves in: the design, creation, hosting, and support of their website had been handed off multiple times between different agencies, and some things had been lost in a long game of telephone; they were in a support contract, but didn’t feel supported; they knew they needed to make some big changes to their site, but needed guidance on where to start. They needed a partner that would be both capable and transparent, and help them take their site to the next level.

Understandably, CreativeGround was wary of jumping into another agreement with yet another dev shop, so we started off slow. Through concise communication, thorough support, routine site updates, and honest recommendations over the course of several months, LCM was able to show CreativeGround that it’s possible to have an expert team of developers on their side, with all of their best interests in mind. 
 

LCM migrated the CreativeGround site from an internal host server— which caused a lot of troublesome deployments due to a complex workflow— to Pantheon. This move offers CreativeGround more control over their own site, increased transparency around the work performed on it, and greater ease when it comes to deploying work and performing site updates. Not to mention, it will save them time and money on all fronts!

Last Call Media has continued to assist CreativeGround with site maintenance and feature development since the switch. They remain one of our favorite partners to work with.

Last Call Media has been incredibly attentive to our unique needs as an arts nonprofit. They’ve gone out of their way to do more than just maintain our site. There’s heart to their work!

Nicholas Medvescek, Website Administrator, CreativeGround
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Continuous delivery to the College of Natural Sciences.

Processes
  • Continuous Delivery
Team Leadership
  • Senior Producer
    Kelly Albrecht
  • Senior Architect
    Tom Fleming
  • Senior Development
    Tom Fleming

LCM has been pleased to offer our expertise whenever possible to the UMass College of Natural Sciences. 

It has been a pleasure working with you and the very knowledgeable and competent team at Last Call.

Beth Armour, Web Designer/Production Administrator, Center for Agriculture, College of Natural Sciences

We’ve worked alongside the College of Natural Sciences at UMass Amherst on numerous projects. These projects have included the migration of department sites and functionality into Drupal 7, as well as ongoing consulting on and the implementation of new functionality, such as event sharing across all departmental Drupal websites. In addition to Drupal, we’ve assisted with WordPress, Joomla, and even DevOps needs for their internal server infrastructure.

We have used the expertise of the wonderful folks at Last Call for several projects with outstanding results. Last Call has always been attentive to our needs and our budget while not compromising quality.

Beth Armour, Web Designer/Production Administrator, Center for Agriculture, College of Natural Sciences
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Heavy lifting for the new Amherst.edu.

Processes
  • Continuous Delivery
Team Leadership
  • Senior Producer
    Kelly Albrecht

We joined their internal team to provide our expertise.

Amherst College needed expert assistance with some of the heavy lifting as they upgraded their infrastructure from Drupal 6 to version 7. Resource needs were fluctuating as the project was nearing its last stretch of available time. We provided availability that scaled up and down as needed to hit the project’s overall strategic launch date for the college.

Our engagement included working with in-house developers to migrate and upgrade numerous features and systems to work with the most current major Drupal version. Highlights of our primary focus on the project included systems handling:

  • Scheduling, registration, and payments for reunion events
  • A dynamic implementation of fundraising forms providing visitors the ability to give in various ways, in different contexts, to several different departments in the college
  • Menus, rating, and reviews for Dining Services
  • Management functionality for various college book clubs
  • The tool used by the area’s five colleges for their students to request and register into courses across the Five College Consortium
  • Payment processing for use by all aspects of the site needing to process payments

Amherst College relaunched a fully functional upgraded Drupal CMS on their online infrastructure.

Thanks for the pieces you guys worked on with that, it was a big help.

David Hamilton, Chief Information Officer, Amherst College