TouchDesigner
Derivative makes TouchDesigner, a visual programming platform used by artists, developers, and studios for real-time interactive media. CimpleO rebuilt derivative.ca on Drupal Commerce: a licensing and checkout system for the software itself, a learning and support hub, and a community space bringing together a forum, wiki, and showcase in one login.
The Challenge
The site had to do the job of several separate systems at once: sell and manage software licenses, host a knowledge base and forum that already had years of history in older platforms, and serve as the front door for a global user base evaluating or buying TouchDesigner. None of that could be bolted onto a generic e-commerce template. License purchases had to trigger real entitlements, support hours had to be tracked and billed, and community content from PHPBB and MediaWiki had to move over without losing history.
Payments added their own layer of complexity: PsiGate and PayPal both needed to work, VAT had to calculate correctly at checkout for international customers, and license keys needed a migration path that didn’t break existing installations.
What We Built
Licensing and commerce
- Drupal Commerce integration tied to a key license server, driving license issuance directly from purchase
- Checkout and shopping cart, with PsiGate and PayPal Instant Payment Notification support
- My Licenses and License Revisions pages for customers to view and manage what they own
- Support Hours: a billable-hours system tied to license tier, with its own admin overview
- Non-commercial license limits enforced directly in the checkout flow
Content and community
- Learn section: user guide, knowledge base, forum, events and workshops, resources
- MediaWiki migration and ongoing sync, with automated cron-triggered export/import
- Forum migrated to Discourse, integrated under single sign-on with the rest of the site
- Showcase, Community, and Features sections with filter widgets and a “Related Projects” component
- Job board for postings related to the TouchDesigner community
Platform
- Apache Solr for site-wide search, including autocomplete
- CRM tooling for tracking customer and license activity
- Automated deployment pipeline and a documented migration process for users, licenses, and license revisions
- Full Drupal security update pass and a code review of the existing codebase before the rebuild began
Delivery
The rebuild ran as a series of numbered milestones covering the site section by section: landing page, account area, TouchDesigner product pages, Learn, Get (purchase), and footer, before layering in commerce, licensing, and the forum and wiki migrations. Weekly and monthly reporting kept license and support-hours data visible to the client throughout. The engagement continued past launch into ongoing support hours, workflow fixes, and feature requests.
