National Theatre Wales launches with Drupal

At 12.30pm on November 5th 2009, John E McGrath Artistic Director of National Theatre Wales (NTW) announced the company’s first year of work at a press briefing in Cardiff. It was simultaneously broadcast through video streaming to the world. Attracting nearly 3,000 internet users from all around the world, they joined staff, guests and artists that were in attendance at the live event, at the company’s shop/office at Castle Arcade, Cardiff.

NTW's first year of work intends to theatrically map Wales. Twelve shows over one year (plus an additional finale), will take place in locations across the country, bringing the very best of Welsh writing, performing and directing together with world class artists and world class ideas from across the globe.

http://nationaltheatrewales.org

When it began

We had already worked with Drupal on previous projects with International Baccalaureate Organisation and Cardiff Design Festival, not to mention a few other sites that exist just for learning experiences. With the core set of tools Drupal provides, it seemed the natural choice in approaching the National Theatre Wales website. Initial meetings with the Theatre’s creative team included both internal and external expertise covering theatre, social media, graphic design and marketing/pr. With so many individuals and companies included at the early stages, there were lots of ideas thrown around to what the website should do and accomplish.

Working with an existing community

NTW already had a growing online user-base within their community hosted at Ning.com and it was imperative that this community was not lost or neglected on the new site. The decision was made that the Drupal site should pull content from Ning and no user created content features should be made available through Drupal, this ensured that all feedback and user based content was handled by Ning alone.

Unfortunately due to time we were unable to create a specific module to manage the conversation between Drupal and Ning. Having said that there maybe limitations with the Ning Api surrounding the availability of pushing and pulling data, but still something that Hoffi would like to look at in the not to distant future.

We opted to go back to basics and use RSS from the Ning community and a manual editorial process to publish the content in Drupal. Using the FeedApi and FeedApi Mapper modules combined with CCK we were able to pull fresh content in as Nodes from the Ning community and prepare it for publication by the NTW communications team.

The design and JQuery

From the initial project planning stages we realised that the site would need an edge and be different from other Theatre Companies, this probably stems from the unique approach that NTW had from the beginning through digital and more traditional brand channels. It was felt that the user should be a piece of a performance, but also feel accomplished at using the site.

Through existing knowledge of Drupal and it's core extension modules, such as CCK and Views. We were able to approach the design with an open mind and create something that really extends NTW’s brand online.

The homepage contains no exact logo, instead its essence is created through the photography, which can be poked and prodded to allow the user to discover more, and experiencing a subtle performance as the photography moves around the browser.

This was accomplished using a mixture of the Views module and some creative JQuery written by Hoffi’s development team.

Development Team

The Hoffi team on the project consisted a total of three; a project manager, designer and developer, with a number of other individuals working to produce content for the site.

Modules used

Quite a short list of modules and probably some of the most common, when extending Drupal’s core functionality.

• CCk
• Date
• FeedApi
• FeedApi Mapper
• FileField
• ImageApi
• ImageCache
• ImageField
• Link
• Pathauto
• Token
• Views

Final thought

We would just like to thank all those involved in the Drupal community and we hope this article and the NTW website will help and inspire a little.

Visit http://nationaltheatrewales.org to see the site in action or visit http://www.hoffi.com for more information.