Web Development Services
Upper Room Media builds Catholic websites and applications using the Drupal content management system (CMS) and development platform. Our web development role is to provide configuration of the core system and appropriate add-on modules, and custom module development (when needed) to provide the desired features and functionality. In addition, we provide theme development (theming) services to produce the creative design chosen for your project.
We perform our development work on a web accessible development server, so that milestone stages are available to you for review and testing. This online development environment also allows for content production and publication, and hands-on training before the site is rolled-out to its live production environment. For the launch to live, we can make the site available to your hosting provider for migration to their servers, provide migration services to move the site to your hosting provider, or if we are providing the hosting, migrate the site to one of our production servers.
Site Building
Drupal's functional power is produced by a lightweight core system, supplemented by the intelligent use of available add-on modules, and, in few cases, custom developed modules. Over our years of working with Drupal to build Catholic websites, we have come to know which modules are best suited (from the standpoint of functionality, as well as stability and security) to your particular needs. So, once your needs are identified, we most likely already have the module, or module combinations identified for the solution. That said, it is also important to understand that we don't reinvent the wheel with every project. In fact, it is in our interest, and yours, if we can apply certain widely useful, pre-built module configurations to a large number of projects. This is one of the benefits of working in a niche space, such as Catholic new media, where many clients share similar functional requirements. As a result, our configuration services offer more rapid development, greater value, and added peace of mind.
Theming
Today’s Drupal themes are tableless structures composed of PHP templates, which contain the HTML mark-up and PHP code for rendering content; cascading style sheets (CSS), which provide instructions for placement and styling of the template elements; and various image files. This interdependent component model provides the experienced Drupal themer with tremendous flexibility and efficiency, since template structures and CSS code snippets are portable to any other Drupal theme. Our Drupal theming service thus offers Catholic organizations with a wide range of design possibilities that are very affordable. We can create the design you want with valid, secure, standards-based code. All our themes are cross-browser tested, and tuned for SEO and accessibility.
Custom Module Development
Though there are nearly 10,000 contributed modules for Drupal that provide a near limitless array of features and functionality, there may arise a case where your exact needs are not already met by one of these. For such a case, we would be able to create for you a custom module that provides exactly the functionality you need. For example, one Catholic client needed a payment gateway for their ecommerce site, but there were no existing modules for the payment processing service he wanted to use. Using other Drupal payment gateway modules, and the API information from the client's payment processor, we were able to easily fill that void. Typically, such custom development does not require writing all the code from scratch, since existing contributed modules can usually provide a significant portion of what is needed.