Student Voyage - A Joomla! CMS Customization

Student Voyage, a travel company based in Spain, wished to upgrade their existing website to automate the process of publishing content to the website. For this purpose they teamed up with Open Source Development. Since their requirements were such that could be easily met by customizing an open source package, we made use of the Joomla! open source CMS to provide Student Voyage with a dynamic website that they could easily update and manage themselves.


Customer Profile
Student Voyage is a travel company based out of Spain. Run by expatriate Americans, Student Voyage aims to provide American high school students a chance to visit Spain and broaden their perspective and cultural understanding.


Business Requirement
Student Voyage had an existing website to share information about their services and programs. Since the website was a static one, Student Voyage was facing difficulties in updating the website. They wanted a solution that would enable their administrators, having limited technical knowledge, to update content appearing on the website, with ease.


Customizing the Joomla! CMS to develop a dynamic website
Open Source Development customized the Joomla! CMS to provide Student Voyage with a dynamic website to share information about their program and interact with prospective students.

The designs and layouts of the Joomla! templates were customized to meet the requirements of Student Voyage. A host of value added features have been incorporated in the website. Applications forms for the various programs run by Student Voyage have been provided. The students can download them and submit it offline. Students can fill out an online form to request DVDs. The administrator can view a list of received requests and can process them accordingly.

The website also includes a list of all events and sales being organized in various stores. Visitors can browse through events and sales listings and can also submit requests to the administrator, to get specific events/sales listed.

Students can subscribe to newsletters. The administrator, in turn, can view a list of newsletter subscriptions and can create and send newsletters to the subscribers.

The Joomla! admin module can be used by our client to manage the website on their own. The content appearing on the various sections of the websites, such as FAQs, About Us etc can be easily updated through the admin module. The administrator can also generate reports to monitor the performance of the website.

 

Technologies used in developing this application are:

                                                     

Summary
With the successful customization of the Joomla! CMS software package, Open Source Development has provided Student Voyage with a cost effective solution to manage their website and better represent their programs. Joomla!, being extensible and flexible in nature provides Student Voyage with the opportunity to easily integrate additional functionalities and components thereby catering to possible future enhancements.