Interdependent Web

session details: Mystery Showcase Site - Higher Education / Museum

Mystery site unveiled: Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts at WUSTL -- currently at http://beta3.palantirbeta.com

• school actually has five branches
• design by Studio Blue presented challenges
  
  • two-pane design with sliding effect for simultaneous presentation of information and "inspirational content"
  • looks awesome on an iPhone!
    
  • multiple instances of Zen layout inside each other to display two nodes in a single page
  • all good designers "cheat the grid" -- Zen gives you that flexibility
  • two-node layout was designed to degrade gracefully in case client decides to abandon side-by-side layout
  • left-hand pane is cached so that you can change the right pane without reloading the left (and without frames)
    
  • no core was hacked in the making of this layout!
  • non-web-safe fonts are images substituted in with jQuery, so they degrade to plain text
    
• new modules to be released very soon
  
  • Flashy: a GPL multimedia player for locally hosted video!
    • player module for .flv files with Filefield formatter
    • still somewhat basic
  • SWF Embed: because SWFObject doesn't get along with jQuery
  • Views Date Range
    • allows arbitrary date ranges for views
    • was incredibly hard to accomplish -- very ugly SQL!
  • Views Cycle
    • makes slideshows out of lists output from views
• what's next
  • site will launch later this month, modules released next week
  • Mildred Lake Kemper Art Museum site will be a twin site on the same Drupal install with Domain Access