Events Management With Style
Client:
Economist Conferences UK Economist Group's UK conferences division wanted something a bit smarter than their previous, hosted events website. They wanted something people could engage with. Something that started a conversation. Something that allowed them to showcase all the great stuff the Economist was doing, as a group, and leverage that to enhance their own profile in the events marketplace.
We were delighted to win their business and have worked closely with a smashing team at the Economist over the last few months to bring to fruition a product we're all really proud of. It's media rich, with news, video, reviews, blogs, press releases, visitor comment throughout and a neat events calendar. The events themselves have advanced designs using jQuery tabs for a slick interface.
We've incorporated as much flexibility as possible, allowing the Economist team to theme their own splash pages, incorporate links to content on other sites, manage feeds of content from other news sources, including Economist.com (also on its way to being a Drupal website) and provided them with various templated look and feel options.
In partnership with Cantos and Brightcove we created the hosted video elements of the website. Videos are hosted and streamed in a custom Brightcove player (we are Brightcove Solutions Partners, by the way) managed and controlled by Cantos. We integrate this in Drupal using the Embedded Media Field CCK module and the Media: Brightcove add-on module for it.
And behind the scenes we've done bags of work on the Drupal user interface to make it as easy as possible to use, grouping sensible functions together on node edit forms, installing modules like Vertical Tabs to improve the node add/edit page lengths, and various other tricks - including modules we created especially for this job to make admin easier.
Contributions:
We created two major modules for this project. Firstly, Node Reference Variables allows you to load nodes that are referenced in to the parent node's template as variables, ready to drop in. We used the Tabs module to place them in our Event pages as jQuery tabs (the module does this for you).
Secondly, we created Mark-up Snippets. It still has a few teething problems when using it with the WYSIWYG API, but it's a work in progress. It allows you to save the contents of the node body field in the database, as a "snippet", for later use. There is also an admin user interface for managing your saved snippets (deleting and editing - additional is only achieved from inline on the node forms).
