What does does HotDrupal do and how do you work with Drupal?
HotDrupal is a Drupal hosting company that provides a hosting solution with a seamless upgrade path from shared hosting, to VPS, all the way to multiple dedicated server solutions. Our customers really like that we have higher end plans that are the equivalent of "supercharged" shared hosting which gives you VPS-like speeds without the need for you to be a systems administrator. We have a strong commitment to donating back to the Drupal community, as well as to environmentally friendly practices and pro-employee policies.
As a hosting company, why did you decide to get involved with supporting Drupal specifically?
It was the community. Our owner has been involved with web hosting since the early 1990's. After working with some other CMS systems and coming across Drupal, we noticed in the forums how much difficulty people had finding compatible hosting providers that offered good service and had enough power to run Drupal. We thought it would be cool to make a solution that people could use that would "simply work" with Drupal and offer an upgrade path that was simple.
What does Commerce Guys do and how do you work with Drupal?
Our main focus is providing clients with great integration between Drupal and Ubercart. Along with this, we also help our clients with general business advice on things like how to market products well on a website, identifying their target markets, and reaching those markets effectively. Our clients sell a variety of good and services from physical products to file downloads and premium content access. We help each individual client figure out how to set up a Drupal ecommerce site that works best for their business.
What led you to get involved in the Ubercart project and what has your experience been?
Our company was founded around the need for better support for ecommerce on Drupal sites. We discovered Ubercart while researching shopping cart solutions for a client almost three years ago. We were amazed at what could be done with the combination of a great content management system and a tightly integrated shopping cart. Ubercart has been a really great system of modules to work with. The forums at Ubercart.org are unlike anything I have seen in the shopping cart/ecommerce arena, and working with an active community is really helpful (as everyone from the Drupal community knows well).
Tell us about what New Signature does and how you work with Drupal.
New Signature's full-service creative division provides branding, design, interactive, and advertising expertise under one roof. We combine strategic thinking, distinctive design, and emerging technologies to deliver successful projects that consistently break new ground. We employ the latest tactics, standards and technologies to create an exceptional user experience. Drupal is a powerful technology that we love to use and that fits perfectly with our approach. We provide professional Drupal development services, including custom module development, and have used Drupal to power a diverse set of sites including community web portals, corporate websites, intranet applications, blogs, multimedia sites, and social networking sites. We are active members of the Drupal community and contribute through several means, 1) we work with the community on bug fixes and feature improvement, 2) we are a member of the Drupal Association, and 3) we are a corporate sponsor of DrupalCon DC 2009.
Can you tell us about a recent Drupal-based project that New Signature did that was particularly interesting?
We were really fortunate to have a bunch of exciting Drupal projects over the last year. Two stood out for the team. The first is Campus Progress Action's "i'm voting for" project (www.imvotingfor.org) where we leveraged Drupal's power to create a platform for young people to share their personal experiences and passion for the issues driving them to the polls through video testimonials. The second is the Center for a New American Security's website (www.cnas.org), where we implemented a fairly complex design using a new base theme built on the Blueprint CSS framework. In the past we had typically based our Drupal themes on the Zen starter kit, but we have been using Blueprint for some time and wanted to combine the power of Drupal with the advantages of using the Blueprint. We found that using the Blueprint CSS framework base theme translated into significant time savings in key areas of front-end customization and cross-browser compatibility.