Coaching Ourselves is a management and leadership development program for managers. Coaching Ourselves has partners and clients from many countries around the globe. Hence their primary objective was to have a multilingual site which is extensible as they grow in newer geographies. Apart from the main site they also wanted a partner web site specifically for partners from various countries. The partners would use this site to download sales and marketing material and the coaching sessions for existing/prospective clients. The coaching sessions are developed by some of the leading management thinkers like Henry Mintzberg, Jonathan Gosling and many more. Coaching Ourselves also require customer web spaces for some of their clients which adapt to the Coaching Ourselves program within their organisation.
Drupal provides an excellent framework to enter, manage and categorize data in multiple languages. The coaching sessions are proprietary files in PDF format which need to be stamped with legal text and user names when they are downloaded. Drupal's flexible framework allowed us to use an external library for stamping documents with legal text when they are being downloaded.
We used the i18n module to implement the multilingual feature for this site. The Coaching Sessions were categorized into various Mindsets and Clusters using the taxonomy module. We also categorized the coaching session content by the authors so that we could use the default taxonomy callbacks to display data for a particular category. For example once we had categorized the data with the authors we got the pages for authors which would list all sessions by the respective author. The various Mindset and Cluster lists were implemented as views which were embedded on their respective pages. For the partner site and the customer web spaces we implemented a reporting tool based on the number of times the coaching sessions are downloaded. This was based on a group/individual licensing policy, wherein a license is counted based on a coaching session download by a group or an individual. These features were implemented via a custom module.