Dogfish Head Craft Brewery, located in Milton, Delaware, is one of the 25 largest microbrewers in North America. Starting in 1995, Dogfish Head went from a backroom operation of three little kegs with propane burners underneath to a full-fledged brewery and bottling powerhouse. They ship and sell beer in over 30 states, are currently expanding their brewery, branching out with restaurant franchises, and continue to grow.

The Dogfish Head brand prides itself on a ‘do it yourself’, ‘off-centered’, grassroots style work ethic. When it came time for them to choose a company to build their website, they chose another ‘off-centered’ company, Inclind Inc, not too far from the brewery.

Challenge

The first site was completed by Inclind in 2005 on an in-house Coldfusion powered system. But the demand and popularity of the Dogfish Head brand fast outpaced the technology and in 2007 planning began for a new content management system. We needed the system to be scalable, modular, and able to quickly develop solutions to implement features upon request. It also needed to cater to the Dogfish Head community and allow them to submit content, participate in discussions and contribute to an interactive ‘Fish Finder’ map.

Their new CMS system would also have to support ecommerce, and integrate with Dogfish Head’s Microsoft Dynamics server, an inventory/assets management system which tracks merchandise information, among other things.

Inclind evaluated three potential solutions:

• Build another in-house Coldfusion CMS system
• Use Drupal as a base platform
• Use Joomla as a base platform

It was determined that building another in-house system would take far too much time to develop. The evaluation of Joomla did not prove that it had the ease of extensibility and reliability that we need in a web application, and Drupal did. Thus, Drupal was chosen and development began.

Why Drupal?

• PHP is cheaper to host and less resource intensive than Coldfusion, and no licensing fees apply.
• The LAMP stack is fast, efficient, and easy to work with.
• Large, competent developer community to provide assistance and solutions
• Drupal allows for easy overriding of theme elements for quick implementation of changes
• Drupal’s hook system allowed Inclind to rapidly build modules to develop custom features
• Drupal’s backend was easy to understand for the client for adding content

Design, Content & Theming

Dogfish Head wanted their site to reflect the art and print found on their labels and products, appear rough around the edges and project the style of the culture in the business. Inclind’s graphic designer worked closely with the vice president of Dogfish Head on the design for three months to bring the design ideas to life.

We used taxonomy in conjunction with Node Auto Term (NAT) module to take advantage of the menu system. We also created a custom module to work behind the scenes on a node to create the relations between taxonomy structure and the menu structure. The end result is a breadcrumb for any path that is in the menu system, which is clearer for the end user where they are in the site. When a node is created and placed in the menu, NAT picks up the path and creates the term and trees, which is fed to the menu to create the breadcrumb. Our custom module ties all that together behind the scenes, so all the user has to do is place a node in the menu. Pathauto creates friendly URLs based on the menu path to keep things clean.

Part of the website is dedicated to Q&A from users, a forum, and a community powered map. Users can register for the site, and are allowed to create content. The content is submitted and queued for approval, with exception of the forum section. Staff log into the backend and review Ask Dogfish question nodes, and choose which ones to answer. The ‘Fish Finder’ map is powered by the Location module and lets users input locations of where they bought or were served Dogfish Head beer. This helps other fans of the beer know where to find it in their area. The map itself is its own theme, so we could strip out all elements to have the map load in the entire browser window. ThemeKey module was used to change the theme based on the path of the map.

To make content creation easy for general users, we made use of a few custom modules to remove a lot of elements from the node form and auto populate the values depending on the content type. All we wanted to present to the user was the Body field, and not have them see anything they did not need to see.