Official Launch of Lyemium

Lyemium
Lyemium is a new Arts & Design website, dubbed “The Visual Mass Media Of Art & Design”. The website is to showcase the individual artist, designer, and all things related. If you frequent several design blogs and web portals you may notice that a lot of sites are more Wordpress CMS-Centric. The idea of Lyemium is not only to promote individual artist and designer but to also to serve the Drupal design community on a whole.

The initial site was launched in the third quarter of 2009 and has now been revised and redesigned, in house, from scratch to keep up with the latest web standards, design practices, and visual trends that rapidly change in the design community and better reflect the current state of Drupal being a powerful and flexible CMS.

The site is being powered by Drupal version 6 with the anticipation of porting to Drupal 7 once the final version becomes released to the public. The modules chosen for Lyemium, which will be discussed later, were picked with Drupal 7 compatibility in mind. The actual development took place over a period of approximately 4 months to complete, ending February 28, 2010.

The purpose of this case study is to introduce all the significant elements of the website from a project management perspective where Feedback, comments and suggestion are greatly appreciated where the input provided by the Drupal community will be used toward a future version of Lyemium.

Key Features

• A visually appealing website with a lot custom theming, based of the Framework theme.
• Article content type featuring a slideshow within each node.
• Use of new jquery media to display taxonomy terms.

The Details

Theme

The site design of Lyemium is based of the Framework theme. What we liked about starting on the Framework theme was the fact that is provides a 24 column grid at 950px out-of-the-box, and by viewing our CSS the main body of the site is 950px in width.

When viewing our Frontpage you will notice a grid layout like no other. Our way of standing out from the crowd was not to have the frontpage that would look like your typical blog, or news web portals popular today, instead, we placed content and navigation in a way that we want our readings to view the actual content at hand. By this we wanting to reduce the level of advertising spots that many have grown accustom to. As well as reduce our in body advertisement spot on the front page to only one. Our final spot where advertisements could be displayed is in our site-wide header.

For the content body, and node construction of Lyemium we should note that there was no use of the Panels module. We discovered as time progressed and the complexity of Lyemium that the decision to not use Panels was correct in our implementation of content. The site was designed to be compatible with Google Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer (7 and above) and Firefox.

To view our front page you can simply visit Lyemium

Article Content Type

One unique feature about Lyemium is our Article Content type, what it does is take multiple images and places them in a slideshow format, powered by the Dynamic Display Block module. As new content is produced using the article content type the slideshow will only present the images within the node that it contains and nothing more.

To see a working example you can view any of our article node types for example: Article Content

Sources of News Stories

Most routine news items and story updates throughout the day are written directly in the Drupal UI. The Drupal system allows any reporter to post news without having to learn any technology skills.

Authors The author of a published item may not always be a registered user of the site, therefore as a result we created a vocabulary for authors to be used as byline information, this feature also supports multiple authors per story.

Taxonomy Term Page

Our taxonomy term page is displayed using views but utilizes JQuery to produce a more dynamic grid structure than what is shown on our front page.
You can view an example at: Taxonomy Example

The Modules

Views & CCK, were our savours to this project, which many if not all Drupal users can relate to. We found these two specific features reduced our development time and had us focus on the main goal which is the sites overall look and feel of Lyemium.

Imagefield & Imagecache was used to handle our image needs.

Nodereference which is a powerful module included with the use of CCK to allow content admins the power to link and associate content together.

DDBlock very useful in displaying our in node slideshow.

FCK Editor is our rich text editor used behind the scenes however we are looking at the Wysiwyg
module when we make the shift to Drupal 7.

Backup and Migrate used to transfer our site from production to live, as well as all our backup needs, this is an essential feature and should be included in core, but until then we recommend every Drupal user to have this module in the arsenal.

IMCE handles all our image uploading purposes, and works perfectly with the FCK Editor.

Lightbox used to display images in their original size, quite often we may have images that are too large to be shown in the initial design and instead of compromising the actual design of the image we offer our readers to view the image full size.

Mollom to protect us from spam and should be essential for all Drupal installations.

Pathauto for SEO purpose, use this with the Path module and Meta tags module.

Google Analytics to track our visitors and see what content is popular.

Devel perfect set of tools for site developers.

Drush In house personal favourite command line for Drupal.

Search 404 a module that performs a search in your database if a website URL can no longer be found. We suggest adding this module to your arsenal to take advantage of Drupal's powerful searching features.

Jquery update must have if you plan to utilize jquery.

Site Performance

Boost Caching

For site performance and to handle any sever load we have implemented the Boost Module. What Boost does is provide caching to reduce server load. How Boost operates is that it converts dynamic pages into static HTML.

Challenges

Our biggest challenge came with the actual coding of theme itself. After we completed all the necessary work to have Lyemium, go live, we stumbled upon a set in cross browser testing. Apparently what happened was that our front page and javascript did not perform as expected under Internet Explore 7.
We found that IE7 was less tolerant with the javascript and CSS implementations. Our problem with the front page required mostly, extra CSS code for IE7 while the javascript required us to strip down the function a bit to have our desired functionality. A positive on our part, was the fact that, after the minor customizations to the Javascript file, performance and functionality was not affected on other browsers.

Conclusion

The re-construction of Lyemium proved to be a daunting and what felt at some points, an endless task. However, after development, and the brief learning curve we found it to be the most flexible CMS platform with endless customizations and opportunities. This conclude the case study of Lyemium and we hope to provide the community with future case studies on potential projects and collaborations.