Fullcourt.com, focusing on women's basketball

I don't do a lot of outside work these days -- I'm pretty busy in my job with the Morris Publishing Group -- but awhile back I was approached to do some consulting for a project funded by J-Lab at American University.

Kelly Kline of Atlanta had a small grant to build a women's basketball website that would unite a couple of existing projects and take it all to a new level. The result launched in the middle of last week: http://www.fullcourt.com/

I wound up actually building the site in my spare time -- it was easier than writing specifications and creating a project that needed to be managed.

The site merges the assets of Kelly's "Inside Women's Basketball" website and Lee Michaelson's "Full Court Press" into one package with new content from The Sports Network. It's built on a Drupal 6 foundation because the necessary D7 contributed modules weren't available at the beginning of the project. Relatively little code-writing was necessary -- mostly Views output theming and a bit of magic to pull in thumbnail images from outside sources such as Blip.TV and Smugmug.com.

The key modules are fairly predictable:

• CCK
• Views
• Imagecache
• Panels
• Workflow
• Feeds
• Rules (to work around a bug in the Feeds Tamper module)

"Story" was modified heavily with new fields. Bylines are taxonomy terms, so they're linked to a page of each writer's work.

Photos received special attention. There are several fundamentally different ways to handle photos in Drupal, and this site uses all of them. Photos can be attached directly to the node. Photos also can be created as a reusable "library photo" node and included through a node relation. And for those edge cases when pictures really need to be scattered all through a text, they can be uploaded through CKEditor's image facility (IMCE). In all cases except the last, they're automatically resized to fit the design requirements.

All the story posting goes through a process managed by the Workflow module so correspondents can post raw copy to be edited.

To handle the Sports Network data feed, a separate content type was created. TSN's XML conforms to no known standard, but was fairly easy to parse using Feeds Xpath parser. Late in the process I discovered that Feeds Tamper was not working properly. It was expected to replace TSN's categories like CBASK-W with human-friendly terms like NCAA, but it only processed one rule before stopping. The Rules module was added to fix that, and will probably be useful for other purposes later.

Feeds module also was handy for importing a MediaRSS feed from Blip.TV. Videos are posted to a Blip.TV account and properly keyworded there. Based on the keywords, they're made available in both a Videos section and in the corresponding content sections. While there is no Drupal module to pull in Blip's image thumbnails, it was possible to solve the problem at the imagecache layer with this: http://drupal.org/node/251009#comment-2859790

The Sports Network has a gigaton of data and statistics, all available through XML, but rather than reverse-engineer the fairly complex data model, we just took advantage of TSN's ability to provide a hosted solution. http://drupal.org/project/third_party_wrappers came in handy for this, as TSN can dynamically include remote headers and footers from the main site that have current nav bars and even up-to-the-minute headlines. The header for TSN pages includes the right rail from the main site.

Advertising is managed by http://drupal.org/project/ad. All the current ads are coming from a network, but the plan is for the site to replace them with high-value sponsorships when possible.

There are special content types for managing promo components in a couple of places, most notably the big photo on the homepage. It's prepped in Photoshop to include the type (providing flexibility). Any number of these promos can be placed in a nodequeue that drives a Views slideshow rotator.

The design is based on the Arthemia theme. If we were doing this again it would be built on a D7 responsive HTML5 framework, but Arthemia was relatively sane and supported the geometries we needed for IAB-standard ad units. Designer Danny Moore of Atlanta polished off a lot of burrs with CSS tweaks and attention to detail that made a tremendous difference in the feel.

Boost and APC accelerate the site's performance. If necessary, the ad server and database functionality can be split out as the site grows.

There's still a lot of work to do to migrate around 160,000 users and years' worth of data out of the old Full Court Press site, which was built using ExpressionEngine.