DrupalCon Sydney 2013: Fairly Local - A Drupal Powered iPhone App and Website

Fairly Local is a community-contributed local fair trade product search for Australia consumers, available as both a website and an iPhone app. As a community driven resource, consumers interested in ethical shopping add the local stores where they buy fair trade products, making that information available to the rest of the community.

After running a few years on a custom built platform, we this year rebuilt both the app and website on Drupal, rewriting and redesigning everything from the ground-up.

While there were many interesting adventures during the rebuild worth discussing, this session will explore how we approached:

- Native iPhone app development powered by a Drupal site
- Running third-party websites which build their own ethical product search powered by the Fairly Local Drupal site.
- Integrating Facebook Connect to enable a quick community contributions within the Drupal user system
- Multiple levels of content access for users, brands and certifications.
- The utmost importance of a strong visual design, alongside stable platform development
- Our mobile focus to user-experience, with fully responsive layouts for the website and a clean, simplified and focused UI for the native iPhone app.

We'll also explore our key learnings, and the considerations we have moving forward as we redevelop the site for Drupal 7.