This is my first-ever drupal site. I started by trying to duplicate an ASB VBScript site that a long-lost developer did for me. When the old site's database corrupted a few weeks ago, it naturally accelerated my development of the drupal site. I pulled everything together and posted the beta as quickly as I could.
A big thanks to the module developers, especially CCK, Contemplate, Views, Image Cache, and Organic Groups. I leveraged Google's Maps API and wove that in with my show template. I also have high hopes for the Donations and Adsense Injector modules. I just noticed today there is an Amazon affiliates module, and perhaps I'll switch that out for the static Amazon affiliate block I made.
As a point of design, I felt my job was to mostly get out of the way of the show art. It's nice to have a site where the look and feel changes somewhat along with the content. The biggest design challenge is to offer as much information to the audience as possible without overwhelming them or turning them off. To that end, I attempted to organize the content types in a logical, readable, and attractive way, and give the patrons a printable view of the same data to take with them to for the trip to the theatre.
The theatre companies who post shows on the site have the option to include promotions, complete with headline, description and promotional code, which disappear elegantly if not present. They can also post three different ways to make a reservation: telephone, weblink, or e-mail. Since the companies use a wide variety of reservation services, we opted not to sell tickets on the site but to quickly and easily deliver patrons to the ticket services already in use.
In the future, I hope to build out the OG functionality for each member company, so that we effectively will host microsites for each of them at PLAY7.com. I'd like it to have the depth and ease of use to allow companies to use PLAY7.com/company_name as their primary website if they wish.
I did hit a dead end in my development with the event and eventrepeat modules. I couldn't find an elegant way to list my show nodes on the calendar without replicating them for each performance. It would be nice to have a central calendar for all of the shows, but I didn't want the instances of the shows to show up multiple times in Views, or force the member companies to edit each instance of a show if they wanted to make changes. So, I left this for another day.
As a drupal newbie and a PHP luddite, I would sincerely appreciate your feedback, criticism and encouragement.
Thanks!
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| PLAY7.jpg | 78.78 KB |
