We finally flicked the switch over on another ABC site built in Drupal this week, so all you 70s and 80s music fans can check out the official Countdown website at http://www.countdown.com.au.
We originally tried to leverage a lot of existing modules in their default state to keep development costs down, but ended up custom building a lot of the features to meet the client's requirements. There were also 10,000 existing registered users of the old site that needed to be migrated across, and some tricky integrations with proprietary statistics, streaming video, email newsletter and advertising systems.
Thanks to Andrew Boddy for the UI design, Rimian Perkins & Kim Pepper for the Drupal dev and Melinda Taylor & Leah De-Fina for managing things inside ABC Commercial.
This is now ABC's third major Drupal build, with others already in the pipeline.
Comments
Why does it require
Why does it require silverlight for video? Doesn't work well with my Ubuntu 64, and just another thing for poor windows users to have to download.
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http://singularo.com/
Silverlight is used as ABC's
Silverlight is used as ABC's proprietary solution for DRM protected content and digital downloads in the ABC Shop (http://shop.abc.net.au), so it was used for some free videos on Countdown too despite our recommendation not to for exactly the reasons you point out.
Great to see a constant flow
Great to see a constant flow of Drupal + ABC websites. A quality job, personally for me the flow was disrupted when I had to download Silverlight, but this is a given. Sorry if this is getting off topic but ABC iView which has an ABC Shop component, is built in Flash and I'm interested as to where copyright protection here lies, why are there 2 methods/technologies etc.
I guess the best we can do
I guess the best we can do as developers (and "experts" in our field), is to advise our customers against making decisions like this.
(...and hope that it doesn't blow up in our faces :) )
Thanks for the comments. As
Thanks for the comments. As with any large organisation like the ABC, legacy technology decisions get made within different divisions that development firms like us engaged on individual projects just need to work within.
You can take heart from the fact that Drupal now has a toehold in what had been a pure .NET environment previously.
While iView is all Flash, it does kick you over to the ABC Shop site for digital downloads, at which point the proprietary Silverlight player kicks in. e.g. http://tinyurl.com/ozdcze. This system was built by Hyro for ABC and they have a case study about it at http://www.hyro.com/en/Creative-Design/Projects/Pages/ABCMediaPlayer.aspx
Nice work guys. I accepted
Nice work guys.
I accepted the impending doom that is silverlight a long time ago, so the site was seamless at this end.