Today was a very exciting day in netstudio. After a month of work by Nikos, George and me, we gave to the Drupal development community a Drupal Distribution for building deals sites.

Its name... Open Deals!

Deals because if refers to deals sites (group buying sites). Open because it is free (Zero Priced AND Free to Use) and Open Source.

What is a "Drupal Distribution"

First things first. What is a Drupal Distribution?

It's a pre-set Drupal installation designed to execute a specific task. There are many distributions out there that cater to many needs, like for example online magazines, organising events and seminars, educational institutions, government agencies etc.

Distributions are meant to be used by either developers or users familiar with web technologies, that have both the time and the spirit to dive into their own site's development, or at least a serious part of it.

Solid foundations

Now that we are done with terminology, Open Deals is a Drupal distribution, very easy to install (just like Drupal), that only needs a couple of settings to be set and of course content (deals). Other than that, it's up and running in no time, thus giving birth to a new deals site.

Open Deals is based both on Drupal's strong and stable platform, and is pre-set according to Netstudio's experience, exactly like we would do for a heavy-duty and fully functional site for one of our own customers.

Features and Specifications

In short, the most basic feature of Open Deals are:

• It is able to manage deals with a minimum and maximum number of sales
• Includes countdown to the expiration date of the deal like all deal sites do.
• Easy to administer
• Allows multiple admistrators with different rights.
• It will soon have its own iPhone Application.
• It's extendable, versatile and of course open source since it's Drupal based.
• It comes with its own theme based on deals' sites layouts.
• It's SEO optimized.
• Fully interconnects (e-commerce data) with Google Analytics.

Free and Free of charge

The most important aspect of Open Deals is that it is not only free of charge but also free to use. Anyone can download it, and use to create as many sites as he wants, either for him or his clients, altering anything he wants to.

Professional support

Furthermore, the distribution is supported by Netstudio which has an ever-evolving and experienced team of developers, designers and search engine marketing & analytics experts, that can help even the more demanding users regarding tasks that are either too advanced or simply they don't want to meddle with, such as usability testing, Drupal optimized hosting, design, development, SEO, Analytics, A/B Testing, Multivariate Testing etc.

Continuous improvement and development

The distribution is still in it's frist (alpha1) version, which means that many things can be improved and corrected in the months to come, including new additions and functionalities (like an iPhone Application for the site's users), according always to the interest the Drupal community shows in it. Our first impression though is that there is a warm welcome for Open Deals since the demand for deals sites worldwide is growing.

Demo & Download

You can see the Open Deals demo at www.opendealsapp.com/demo. For the more bold users, you can build your own site by downloading the distribution from www.drupal.org/project/opendeals.

Methodlogy

The distribution was initially a MySQL Dump, which means that during the installation the user was prompted to import a MySQL database. We altered the installation process though to conform to the Drupal Standards and it is now a "proper" Drupal Distribution based on Features.

Comments, Feedback & Error Reporting

We will be happy to receive your feedback either through our contact form, or the Issue Queue of the distribution at drupal.org.

Thanks

I would like to thank both Nikos and Giorgos for their persistence and patience taking into consideration the amounts of pressure that we placed upon ourselves to achieve the distribution's completion, and also Nectarios Sylligardakis from eresus who not only welcomed me into the Drupal community about a year ago but also encouraged me to proceed with the distribution development.