Last Thursday, at 4:37 PM, I got an e-mail from a team at MIT I’ve been developing for: We need brand new feature X, and we need it up and working by tomorrow morning.

Unfortunately, I had an out of town guest, a day job that needed attending, a dog that needed running, and 23 other things that stood in my way. Fortunately, I was using Drupal and was able to pull together the feature, relatively bug-free, between 7 a.m. and 9 a.m. the next morning, fully integrated into the existing site. I didn’t even have to install a single new plugin to get exactly what I wanted.

What did this include?

  • Create a UGC site that asked visitors a questions and collated their responses
  • Tied those responses to a vendor
  • Checked for spam and Captcha'd suspicious-looking responses
  • Promote this feature throughout the site

Check it out