I've been working with custom PHP MySQL apps for quite a few years. Early on I was building grant systems for nonprofit and State Arts Agencies in the United States. About 4 years ago, I fell into Drupal quite by accident at a little think tank that my then employer, The Western States Arts Federation, had organized in Vancouver. Several of the participants were employees of Bryght. I began to drink the cool aid.

The Idea

A number of months back, a group of us had the idea to create a software co-operative. There were several tenets that we decided to follow:

• The company wouldn't have any employees -- everybody involved would be have 1099 status and would be an independent contractor
• The company would be formed as an Limited Liability Company - we chose the state of Delaware
• The company would seek to have a $0 cash and asset value at the end of each year
• The company would be virtual to keep costs low
• We would focus on working with open sourced projects like Drupal

The Setup

We set the company up using Instacorp. The benefit was the speed at which we could set up the company with an automatic legal presence in Delaware. The people at Instacorp made the process incredibly simple, asking a few questions. Within days the legal documents were delivered. That, in itself, really didn't make the company real.

After receiving the legal documents, it was necessary to obtain an FEIN for tax purposes. This is a simple process on the IRS site - it just takes a few minutes and you get the documentation electronically.

Recently I had the privilege of working on the conversion of Novus Biological's website to Drupal 6, selling scientific supplies using Ubercart. I did this as a freelancer for the talented folks at SpireMedia, working with them as well as with fellow Vintage Digital member Ben Jeavons. It was a fantastically intense experience.

Ubercart's a great system out of the box, but there were a number of features on the site which made this implementation difficult.

1. There were about 70,000 products, which is probably two or three orders of magnitude greater than the usual Ubercart site.
2. The site needed to work with three currencies, and four prices, depending on the user's location or selection. Ubercart doesn't handle this well.
3. The site needed to have two kinds of discounts - ones available to most any user, and ones only available to users who had bought the discount with userpoints.

I'll probably write about all of these in time, but at the moment I want to comment on that second item.

If you take a look at www.novusbio.com, or the image above, you'll see a bit of text in the upper right hand corner which says something like 'US site', or 'Europe Site', or 'Great Britain site', or 'World Site', with a little arrow next to it letting you change your region. We would start by pre-selecting a region for the user based on which IP they were browsing from, and then users could change it. If you go to a product page on Novus' site, you'll see different prices based on which of these are currently selected, as well as different currency signs. Since doing something like this is what some people would like to be able to do, I wanted to take a little time to go over how we did this.

Most Drupal shops are highly distributed or scattered. This fragmentation poses interesting challenges. In my most recent job I was lucky to work in an environment that was almost entirely not distributed. This made collaborations with developers, themers, and project managers much simpler.

My life recently transitioned as I moved from being an employee to being a freelancer. In addition, I helped found a company called Vintage Digital (I'll write more about that in the future.) We're engaged in custom software development largely focused on Web applications. Mostly we're working with open source systems like Drupal. We'll be launching a little interim Website in the next few days, nothing special - just a place for us to blog until we have built a proper presence.