Spicers Group is a luxury property group with various unique properties scattered around South-East Queensland. They previously had a different website and domain for each of their properties, and a master website which acted like their homepage; linking to each individual property website.

Spicers Group wanted to move all their sites into one, and so it was decided to setup one Drupal website with each property being a node (of the Property content type). When a property was created, a menu item was also created, as a child of the Intimate Properties view menu item.
On their existing property sites, Spicers had various pages of information related to each property (e.g. accommodation options, location, rates, special offers, events, etc.). These were created on the new site as Page nodes with an extra nodereference field added so they could reference a particular property. Each page node was then added as a child menu item of the property it referenced. This created a nice hierarchical menu of the different properties and their related pages.

Another feature of the existing sites were blocks of related information scattered around the property pages. To implement these on the new site we used a combination of Drupal's existing blocks and a new Property Block content type. The Property Block content type was used when creating a block that was to be displayed on a Property node and its related Page nodes (i.e. all pages related to a property). This was achieved using some tricky views arguments and relationships. Drupal's blocks were used when a piece of information should have only appeared on some pages (i.e. Accommodation but not Location).

As the existing master site had two 'categories' of properties, we needed to add these to the new site too. The Taxonomy module was ruled out due to the complexity of the functionality required, and so two more content types were created: Destination and Experience. Destinations contained information about the different areas around Queensland the properties were located in, while Experiences described what was available at each property. A nodereference field was then added to the Property nodes for each of these new content types. When creating a Destination or Experience, staff would also create a menu item for it, as a child of the respective view menu items (Unique Destinations or Spicers Experience).

Other views were setup to display Properties or Pages in related sections, such as a listing of all properties in a given destination on that Destination's page. The Menu Block module was used for creating the various menu links; this allowed us to specify exactly which level of the hierarchy to display in different sections of the site (such as the main navigation menu, and the footer menu). Pathauto was also used to help create a meaningful hierarchical URL for each page.

Forms were created to link-in with third-party services, such as the newsletter and booking forms. Both of these forms required that each property specify its own ID, so jQuery and PHP were used to get these IDs dynamically from the current property and direct the completed form to the correct URL. Other content types and modules were used to display blocks throughout the site, such as TripAdvisor reviews, special offers and Twitter posts; and to display fonts correctly we used the Cufon module.

Finally, a photo gallery was required for each property. The screenshot from the designers showed a lightbox-type popup window that displayed not only the full-size photo being viewed, but a list of thumbnails of the other photos in the gallery as well. We couldn't find a currently-available solution that displayed a large photo and thumbnails in the one popup window, so we built our own using a combination of the Views Slideshow module (for displaying the large photo and thumbnails) and the ModalFrame API module (for displaying that view in a popup window).

More information about Spicers, and a link to their new site, can be found here: Spicers Group.