A new website for the Civic at Barnsley
The new website for the Civic at Barnsley is yet another demonstration that a site in Joomla! (an open-source Content Management System) does not need to look bland. The site is based on the printed material designed for the Civic by Eleven Design, and follows the layout and colour schemes developed there pretty religiously.
This has resulted in a colour-coded site, with each major category of events in its own distinctive page background scheme. To do this we had to develop some pretty complex templates within Joomla! – which detect the type of page, and display it in the correct colour scheme.
We developed a Flash-based home page (screen-shot above), which rotates through the planned calendar of shows. This is a feature is sometimes seen on national theatre websites, which are working with very much larger budgets, and we had to sweat blood to build it within budget here. As ever, for Flash content, we have a text-and-image alternative for iPod users (if it wasn’t for the fact that this alternative content is also useful for non-visual browsers, I’d say it was a case of 3% of visitors wagging 97% of dog!).
We had a good hunt for a decent calendar to run within Joomla!, but without luck. So we were obliged to develop this component from scratch as well. To reduce development costs and stay within budget we integrated the development with that of the home page display, this had the additional advantage of eliminating the need to re-key data into the system for both items. The default view for the calendar is again a Flash application – which is pretty (click on a date to see what events are happening), but I’m not sure the non-Flash view isn’t more useful, as this provides a list of up-comming events and when they are due to happen, but I guess you get this latter view when you click on the calendar link anyway…
Next up for the Civic is to try and get the Ticketing system so it looks something like the rest of the site. The templating system for the commercial software that runs the ticketing system is bloody awful, unfortunately, so we’ll be struggling to get much out of it… (That will be the subject of another post, or possibly a rant, as so far working on it is has caused hair thinning and cardiac arrest. This is, however, a salutory tale for anyone who thinks that open source systems are inherently ‘worse’ than commerncial systems – believe me it aint the case, Joomla! is open source and well stuck together…).
Anyway, if you fancy a night out in the Barnsley area, why not visit the new Civic site to see what is happening?
