Posted by gollyg on July 13, 2009 at 12:14am
The ABC recently launched a suite of sites for digital radio - and they were built in Drupal!
The sites are:
http://abcdigmusic.net.au/
http://abcjazz.net.au/
http://abccountry.net.au/
Apart from the slick design these sites use a lot of third party integration to pull information from various sources, such as musicbrainz, youtube and wikipedia. For example check out http://abcdigmusic.net.au/artist/peter-gabriel
Maybe we could persuade Fergus, one of the project owners, to come and talk to the Sydney group one meetup!
The blog post from Dries is at:
http://buytaert.net/australian-broadcasting-corporation-using-drupal
Comments
How do we get more info?
It would be very cool to find out more about what went into making these sites. At the Sydney meetup perhaps? Or can we contact the webmasters direct (if they're brave enough to make their e-mails available)?
ABC Drupal sites
Hi there:
James Gollan is our lead developer for the ABC's social media site http://pool.org.au who also has been helping out with the Dig sites will be presenting at the next Sydney meetup. And I'll be attending the next Melbourne one.
Cheers :~john
pool.org.au Australian public broadcasting does open source media
Excellent
Thanks for the info. Unfortunately I can't make the Sydney July meet-up.
I wish it were true!
I would love to take some credit for those sites, but they were nothing to do with me. My involvement started and stopped with 'Yeah, I reckon Drupal could do that'.
David Seth
David Seth (http://twitter.com/davidseth) filled me in about some of the technicals when he came to Melbourne handing things over pre-launch, but he's in the far north usually so not easy to snag for a presentation.
Dries was kind enough to blog this at my request - bloody useful for Drupal marketing in Australia. kudos to ABC for stretching themselves on this! (see you tomorrow John!)
Howdy from up north
I was the sole Drupal developer on the project so I would be happy to answer any questions. I would make this post a bit longer, but just heading out the door.
Just a quick rundown of Modules:
And of course a heap of custom modules and some re-working and updating of contrib modules. I am looking to feed that back into the community...
If the ABC approves it, I will also be writing a case study to be posted on drupal.org.
Ping me if you ever get this
Ping me if you ever get this case study up, as it may be appropriate for the front page.
Thanks for that.... Quick
Thanks for that....
Quick question, why was Friendlist chosen over say user relationship module for user networking?
http://zugec.com
Rules integration
Two words: Rules and simplicity.
Friendlist.module is better thought out inernally, the API looked better and it was less code. But most importantly it incorporates Rules.module. This is so important as to be a deal breaker for any module that doesn't have it.
I will explain... I also using userpoints module and wanted to award points for every time someone makes a connection to another user. With User Relationship.module I would have had to create a custom bit of code to make the integratin happen. With Friendlist.module all I had to do was click a few buttons in the Rules section and create a rule that simply stated "Any time a friendlist connecion occurs, award 1 point to the connecing User.".
EASY.
Using Rules.module also meant that any time a user recommended some content (via Flag.module) they were also awarded points. Again this was a simple rule with a few simple clicks.
A rule can encompass most anything, even a file upload can be checked if it is an audio format and converted to MP3 format (via FFMPEG) and replaces the original file. Of course this rule was a bit more complex because it uses some custom PHP, but the principal was simple.
So, after all that ;) To sum it up...
RULES!!
Cheers,
David
The Development Team for ABC Dig Music, ABC Jazz and ABC Country
Wow, it's great to see the interest in the sites within the community. They've also garnered a lot of attention inside the ABC, thanks to the great work from the site producer, Graham Hill, the designer Bec Smith, Drupal developer David Peterson, programmer Josh May and CSS/HTML developer Bec Gannon.
The sites' aggregation functionality has demonstrated the possibilities of semantic web technology for an editorial organisation like the ABC, and the community features make browsing the website a lot less of a lonely experience.
I just wanted to clarify; James Gollan was very generous with advice early on in the planning and commissioning stage of the project. The work he'd done on Pool and his general reputation around the ABC gave us confidence in the decision to use Drupal as the core of the sites.
I'd be more than happy to come along to a future Drupal meetup, but I can only really talk with confidence about boring commissioning stuff. As is evident above, David's certainly the best person to talk about the nuts, bolts and modules of the site.
Technical and Strategic Projects Manager
Mutiplatform and Development
ABC Radio