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By bazzmann on
"Venipedia: l'enciclopedia di Venezia" is an online encyclopedia all about Venice, Italy. A project by Bazzmann Srl. It's an innovative cultural project to know and preserve all the informations about the city and the Venitians, mapping the past, present and future through various ways and media to do it. At now the project was started an italian language only, but soon there will be both english and italian.
Why Drupal was chosen:
We (Bazzmann Srl) decided to start our own project dedicated to the city we love. Since the complexity and the huge variety of informations to publish, the information architecture we chosen to set up through the way we call "circular information", the multilingual nature of the project and the various tools we planned to activate during all its lifecycle, we have not doubt to choose Drupal 7 as the ideal platform to work with.
We work with various CMS systems (Wordpress, Microsoft CMS, Sharepoint, Liferay, and others) and we built our own CMS in the past, but since the version 6 of Drupal, we elected it as our standard platform to build web solutions.
That's because of the solid and flexible core framework, the availability of many useful modules and the power of its multilingual and performance system. We also like the opportunity to join the community with patches and translations, as far as we can.
Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome):
The requirements of the project are: power, flexibility, scalability, performance and security.
We planned to build a real, modern, innovative, useful, smart and exhaustive encyclopedia about the city of Venice, mapping the past, the present and the future. We built it to improve the knowledge of the story, the art, the crafts, the institutions, the identity of the Venitians, the unknown informations and many other things.
Geolocalization
We work with geolocalized contents (churches, palaces, bridges, fields, monuments and buildings), using Leaflet map library as our default maps system. All the other contents (museums, libraries, cinemas, ...) are related to them and we extract the related maps through a backreference.
Venipedia TV
Venipedia TV is a web tv based on multiplatform social media like Youtube and Vimeo. Its goal is to promote the major number possible of cultural and high-quality videos about Venice, from institutions, researchers and everyone are in the target. We developped it to easily manage and plan realtime streaming based on Google Hangouts, and other streaming platforms. More, we inserted it inside our circular information architecture, so videos could be related to other contents.
Audio support
All the contents are audio ready. This means that every single content will be supported by audio file that "read" the page and simplify the learning approach. For example, we applied it to the "slang" section of venitian language, to learn the pronounce of it.
Contextual informations
Every content has contextual informations. They could be simple related information (date of birth, real name, address, external website links, ...) or in relation to other contents (dossier, peoples, images, videos, ...). It's an important aspect of the project, to grant an easy but complete way to learn and read the contents.
Push random informations
To promote many contents in single regions of the home page, Venipedia uses various views with random sorting. All the views area cached to keep the performance in the best level possible. Some of them are simple text, some other contains image too.
Timeline
To promote recent content published, the home page has a timeline view. It shows the last 4 contents published. A more expanded timeline is planned for the future, as further tool to read the contents.
QR Code
We also apply a QR Code to all the contents. At now reach the goal to permit its application in other printed content or to create mobile content ready. We planned a more complex use of it, but still not in the roadmap.
Community
Community are planned and soon we'll release the starter version. Community tools will be the opportunity to vote contents, send contents to editorial staff, report/suggest corrections, comment and bookmark. More tools will be released.
Quality assurance and security
We deeply believe in quality assurance. That's why we have a lot of things under the hood: html purifier, redirection module, link checker, image cache presets, role based wyisiwyg editor, added cache module for external links, password policy, spam control, and other solutions inside. We love Drupal for this: we can work with tons of really useful tools.
Technical specifications
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen:
All these modules were chosen to grant the requirements and the goals of our project. They are really useful to improve our work, and help us to do all the things we have in mind, bringing a good user experience to our readers.
Community contributions:
We contributed with some patch and comment to some module like xml sitemap, meta tags and almanac. We done various translations to them and other modules. We bring to the community new members and we are promoting the Drupal Association, over to already joined us it.
Team members:
Sectors:
Arts
Blogging
Community
Education
Entertainment
Media
Music
Publishing
Small business
Social Networking
Comments
Excellent work my fellow
Excellent work my fellow italian friends.
I especially like the leaflet map integration and the overall clean design with the title of the page that breaks out of it's content area.
Complimenti!
Ciao,
-miro
Thanks!
Thanks a lot Miro, hope you'll like the new improvements and features that are coming!
Leaflet is a really great map library, we moved from google maps to leaflet and we are really satisfied. They open to many new universe to point new experiments.
Ciao,
M.