Building Dierks Bentley's Map of Home with Drupal

For a developer like myself, there is nothing more exciting than creating something in the virtual world that becomes meaningful to people in the real world. Lately, I’ve had the pleasure of working on some applications that have achieved just that, and there is one in particular that I wanted to share with you.

When one of our clients, Dierks Bentley, met with us about promoting his new single, “Home”, we were inspired to create something meaningful, something that dutifully captured the heartfelt message in his song - we all have a place to call home. It was Craig Dunn, our VP of client services, who came up with the idea that was to become Dierks Bentley’s Map of Home.

As soon as we met to discuss the idea, I knew it wasn’t going to be easy from a functional standpoint, but I was sold on the concept. The idea was that fans would be able to log in and add their own stories of “home” using text, images and/or videos. The stories would then become pins on a large interactive map where anyone could search through others’ stories by clicking on a pin for more info. I loved the vision but faced the challenge of how to build it...

As is the case with so many situations in the entertainment industry, a quick turnaround time was needed on the project. Thankfully, I knew Drupal had some tools in its pocket that would be perfect for the very basic, albeit complex, things that I needed to make the idea to come to life:

1. A custom “Story of Home” Content Type: CCK
2. … where fans could easily add text/photos/videos: Imagefield, Embedded Media Field
3. An interactive map for those location-based stories: Gmap, Location
4. Custom displays of the Home stories, both on a map and in listings: Views
5. Seamless way for fans to add their stories from the same page: Form Block, AJAX

Yet again, Drupal pulled through with most of the heavy-lifting necessary to build the application. Drupal's straightforward solutions not only meant that we were able to hit our deadline but also that I could focus less time on basic functionality and more time on making the user experience as seamless as possible.

With Drupal's help, some fine-tuning of the functionality and an excellent design from Bryan Kemp, we created Dierks Bentley’s Map of Home. So go ahead, check out the stories and maybe even add a pin of your own!

http://dierks.com/home-stories 

For a more detailed tutorial on building an application like this, see this article.