By James Andres on

Hey Drupalites!

We wanted to share with the Drupal world first a sneak peak of
Project Opus 1.0. We have gone to great lengths to incorporate the
feedback many of you had given us previously on the beta site. Thanks
very much for that! We are still working on a number of known
issues, but we feel confident enough to show you now. Anyway we
thought you guys and gals might want to take a look, and give us your
honest opinions on what we have done. If you see anything that
doesn't work or needs to be addressed, feel free to use the built in
bug reporter on the site.

Special Note: any data (songs, blogs, posts, etc..) on the staging
server will be overwritten with the present site's data when we go
live in one week. This is a "testing" database.

Check it out: http://opusstage.projectopus.com

James Andres
Lead Developer, Project Opus

⋅ Categories: Drupal 4.6.x, Drupal 4.7.x

Comments

coupet’s picture

coupet commented

nice work!

can you describe the site development process?

error message:

http://opusstage.projectopus.com/node/1273

warning: mysql_real_escape_string() expects parameter 1 to be string, object given in /var/www/opusstage/includes/database.mysql.inc on line 254.

warning: mysql_real_escape_string() expects parameter 1 to be string, object given in /var/www/opusstage/includes/database.mysql.inc on line 254.

Apache is bandwidth limited, PHP is CPU limited, and MySQL is memory limited.

James Andres’s picture

James Andres commented

Hey coupet,

Thanks for the message!

Progress is comming along really well. We are getting bugs sorted out left, right and centre (so to speak). Currently there are a few major outstanding issues.

1. The one that you noticed (of course this won't show up on a live site because we will turn warnings off). I plan to fix it anyway.

2. A few usibility tweaks we are still working on.

If you notice anything else let us know :-). It makes the job of bug hunting that much easier.

James

Lead Developer on Project Opus
www.projectopus.com

ac23’s picture

ac23 commented

Click on any of the links on the bottom of the page (about/legal/etc.). The title is displayed twice, with that nice title background. Just thought I'd let you guys know.

Besides that (and please excuse my choice of vocabulary), the new site is sexy. Damn sexy. Great drupal implementation.

--
Engineering student by day, web coder by night

James Andres’s picture

James Andres commented

I just noticed that too. Thanks for the note!

James

Lead Developer on Project Opus
www.projectopus.com

ddonat’s picture

ddonat commented

Hi Coupet,

Project Opus was spun out of Donat Group. We used the process that Donat Group uses:
User
Concept/Design
Product developmet
Deployment

Specifically it started - like everything - with a perceived need.
We researched our potential customer base and built out a specs doc.
From there we created a system architecture (that's how Drupal was chosen).
We then created wireframes from which programmers and designers worked.

This got us the beta site presently up on projectopus.com.

Through use and customers feedback, we discovered:
1. we misunderstood a lot of what we were told by our customers
2. our customers didn't know exactly what they wanted until they could actually use a real system.

(3.) some of our Drupal hacks gave us big headaches when we needed to change the site (yes, a number of you warned us that would happen. it did. You were right.)

From the beta site feedback:

  • We came up with a new set of features and some task analyses (How they wanted to do something rahter than simply having a feature permititng them to do something).
  • New wireframes
  • New design
  • New programming. Including generalizing and reprogramming many of our previous hacks into proper mods that have an upgrade path with Drupal.
  • New site.

Although we have a new site, close to 80% of the features in development are presently not in the site. We assume we will be getting a mess of feedback on this site, so we will be releasing new features with adjustments from feedback very quickly throughout the coming year.

We are proud with what we did with drupal, and hope it stands up as a good example.

James Andres’s picture

James Andres commented

Those are different word's aren't they ... oops.

James

Lead Developer on Project Opus
www.projectopus.com

wellsy’s picture

wellsy commented

an even better look to an already great site!

wellsy

orchidsonline.com.au

James Andres’s picture

James Andres commented

Check back on the 15th when it gets released live :-)

James

Lead Developer on Project Opus
www.projectopus.com

wellsy’s picture

wellsy commented

I will certainly be following

wellsy

orchidsonline.com.au

James Andres’s picture

James Andres commented

We will certainly be making anouncements when the 15th rolls around ;-).

James

Lead Developer on Project Opus
www.projectopus.com

radiofranky’s picture

radiofranky commented

your "news" buttom sometimes the color highlight won't show.

What javascript are you using for the top menu?

James Andres’s picture

James Andres commented

Hi radiofranky,

I'll ask our design wizard, Loren, for you. As far as I know it's something custom he cooked up.

Cheers,

James

Lead Developer on Project Opus
www.projectopus.com

lorendavidson@drupal.org’s picture

lorendavidson@drupal.org commented

Hi Franky,

There's no javascript there - that navigation is a standard list. The actual text for each list item is hidden and replaced with an image via CSS, while the current section's state is being set with an active class.

It looks like that class isn't always being set in some places, but we'll be squishing that bug soon - thanks for catching that!

Cheers,
Loren

James Andres’s picture

James Andres commented

It was mentioned so I'm posting a note here.

Project Opus version 1.0 is now officially live.

Time to finish this champagne and sleep. Possibly not in that order.

James

Lead Developer on Project Opus
www.projectopus.com