News

Drupalites Flock to Vancouver Island

Vanessa Turke — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 22:43:34 +0000

If your’re a budding Drupaler still uncertain about attending a Drupal event — hesitate no longer!

Last weekend, Tom, Alex and I took the ferry over to Vancouver Island to attend Victoria’s annual Drupal Camp hosted by North Studio. The Victoria School of Business and Technology (where the event was held) was abuzz with Drupal enthusiasts from as far away as Boise, Idaho. In true open source fashion, the event welcomed all comers ― from people who have never used Drupal all the way up to those who seem to eat, sleep and breathe Drupal Core.

As one of the only women in our office, it’s always particularly interesting to meet other Drupalistas! It’s a rare treat to be able to discuss Drupal project management, information architecture, yoga and shoes in a single conversation. After meeting Anne Stefanyk, a fellow Solution Architect at NorthStudio, I was able to do just that!

Our group hopped the pond with Katy Laan of SeascapeWebDesign. I first met Katy at the Spring 2008 Vancouver Drupalcamp and she’s always made me feel very welcome at the Surrey Drupal Meetups as well. It was Katy who suggested Jeannine Mitchell’s Student Finance 101 Society project for the code sprint. The website helps Canadian students and grads deal with student loans. Jeannine must done some research on the way to a developer’s heart – she filled the table in the code sprint room with chocolate chip cookies!

As devotee of Social Networking, I particularly appreciated Stikky Media’s Simon Vreeswijk’s presentation on Drupal and Social Media. Simon explained that while content should still be optimized, Drupal provides a great platform for organic SEO, Social Media and Community websites. He even shared some tips and tricks for integrating some great new Social Media tools into your Drupal website.

One of the sessions I know many participants found very helpful was Chris Shattuck’s Drupal Development Evolved: From your first Drupal site to team-driven deployment. Chris discussed tools for managing multiple developers on a Drupal project. He talked about the use of version control, Drush for updates, WebEnabled as a development platform, Acquia Drupal, and simple project ticketing. I also got a chance to have a great conversation with Chris about his Drupal UX work.

Thanks to Richard Pattee for his gourmet burger barbeque on Friday! Thanks also to all of you who stopped by for my presentation on preparing Information Architecture for Drupal. As promised, here is the link to my presentation slides. You can also check out Alex and Tom’s presentation on Drupal Theming From Design to Development. Stay tuned to this blog for more of Alex’s and Tom’s informative Drupal design and theming advice!

Your level of involvement in the Drupal community doesn’t need to mirror your skill level – share your passion for this CMS with others, learn, teach, play and find common ground with a great bunch of folks. The next event in our neck of the woods is the Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit — October 24 & 25, 2009, a regional conference for Pacific Northwest Drupaleers. Check the Drupal.org events calendar for happenings near you, or even consider organizing your own Drupal Meetup!

Photo by Alex Ventpap

New Portal Spreads Knowledge Across North America

Jodi Martens — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

The Portal for North America is a unique web-based tool for knowledge exchange within Canada, Mexico and the United States. A project of the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), the site provides resources for researchers, analysts and educators in the area of North American studies.

CIGI called on ImageX media for a fresh, modern design as well as streamlined information architecture and Drupal development to make the wealth of information more organized, easier to search and easier to update. As part of the new site, ImageX helped create a first-of-its-kind Experts Directory, which is a searchable database of experts on all facets of North American Studies. There is also an extensive searchable library and a repository of teaching resources such as videos and case studies.

The new Portal for North America is also incredibly dynamic, with a built-in news aggregator, calendar of events and noticeboard on the homepage, so researchers, professors, legislators and students can keep up-to-date with the latest happenings and information in continental relations.

Cleaner Air Through a Better Website

Jodi Martens — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 19:11:16 +0000

The California Fuel Cell Partnership (CaFCP) has an inspiring goal, one that ImageX Media was only too happy to support through the development of their new website and intranet. The CaFCP is a forward-looking group of auto manufacturers, energy providers, government agencies and fuel cell technology companies who are promoting the commercialization of hydrogen-powered fuel cell vehicles as the best way to achieve California’s goal of cleaner air and reduced greenhouse gases.

Being on the cutting edge of environmental technology, they needed a cutting-edge website. ImageX developed their new public site in Drupal, refined their design, and added several dynamic elements to the home page, including a slideshow, Twitter feed, events calendar and FAQs. Not only does the new site communicate their message in an engaging way, the open source content management system also makes it much more cost effective to manage, update and add new features.

In addition to the public site, ImageX also redeveloped the intranet for the CaFCP, using organic groups to organize events and resources across many groups and subgroups. Notification systems were also implemented, making it easier for the CaFCP members to stay connected and up-to-date.

Future Arts Research on Drupal

Vanessa Turke — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 22:41:11 +0000

F.A.R. (Future Arts Research) at Arizona State University created their new website primarily to promote the Artist in Residence Program which hosts leading national and international artists, critics and scholars who conduct arts research in collaboration with departments within the university, working closely with the surrounding community.

F.A.R. will host 20–24 leading national and international artists, critics and scholars each year showcasing and archiving F.A.R. lectures, research documents, performances, and other artistic forms of expression, making them available to a larger audience. ImageX designed a website that was easy to navigate, maintain and considerate of future needs and possibilities for expansion. The new site includes an Art Project Listing System, Events Calendar & Listing and a Arizona Hot Spots feature that uses a Google map to display area attractions as clickable markers.

For more details on this project, check out our portfolio.

Seattle Tool Launches New Canadian Site

Vanessa Turke — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 23:45:36 +0000

Seattle Tool is a new brand line of a major manufacturer of branded tool sets and tool storage. The new Seattle Tool site serves a critical and vital role in the distribution of Seattle Tool products across North America with their home based in Vancouver, Canada. Drupal’s Ubercart package allows for advanced ecommerce that integrates seamlessly into Drupal’s content management system, integrating order management, transaction and payment workflows. This makes it easy to manage inventory, purchase history, and supports popular payment gateways such as Paypal, Authorize.net, Exact and Worldpay. The Ubercart system supports automatic shipping calculation, including UPS, FedEx and US Postal services as well as a customer address book.

ImageX created a unique design for the Seattle Tool site which gives an overall impression of quality consistent with the Seattle Tool line of products. This sleek website design was also further adapted into a graphical mailing list template for the ImageX CreateSend email newsletter system. The Newsletter System (currently only available to ImageX clients) allows Seattle Tool to easily create and send newsletters to their mailing list subscribers with advanced subscriber management (multiple mailing lists, import/export) as well as power reporting capabilities. This hosted service uses servers that are white-listed by major email providers, lowering the amount of emails that are marked as spam.

For more details on this project, check out our portfolio.

BCIT Launches Site for Change

Jodi Martens — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 22:24:25 +0000

British Columbia Institute of Technology is proving its reputation for innovation yet again – this time with the website www.whatwouldyouchange.ca. The “What Would You Change” project is a subtle recruiting site that invites users to interact with BCIT and other users by showcasing their own creative ideas for changing the world and themselves.

In developing this site, ImageX Media combined various social media angles on a Drupal platform to enable site visitors and members to interact with the site by browsing, viewing, sharing, posting, tagging, commenting and voting. Users can create an animated visual snapshot of what they would like to change using a Drupal-integrated Flash application, which also enables their creations to be modified by other users. They can also make Twitter-esque text comments, view videos (à la Speaker’s Corner), and follow various groups of students at BCIT as they work towards creating change. All of these features can be tagged, voted for, commented on, and shared in a variety of formats by other site visitors.

ImageX and Grey Vancouver Team Up to Revamp Vancouver Magazine

Jodi Martens — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 16:36:36 +0000

ImageX Media had the pleasure of working with the team at Grey Vancouver on the re-design of the Vancouver Magazine website. Vancouver’s premier magazine covers the events, people and issues that make this city sizzle. The site contains a vast amount of constantly changing content – including over 500 restaurant reviews, coverage of local events, and original articles and features. Vancouver Magazine’s previous site had no CMS system, which meant all new content had to be created in Dreamweaver and then uploaded to the site. They needed a site that could seamlessly handle a variety of complex content in a user-friendly way, including a lot of searching, lists and mapping functions, as well as the ability to share information widely through various social media applications.

ImageX assisted Grey with the initial CMS setup and module selection and was responsible for most of the custom development, including the image gallery and reviews system. We also created the restaurant system, including the search function, menu database, location function and the listing and display system.

Since the new site launched, the length of time users stay on the site has gone up by 300%. That means Vancouverites looking for good food, shops and the latest events and ideas are finding what they’re looking for at www.vanmag.com. To read more about the development of this site, check out the case study at Drupal.org.

Drupal Eases the Administrative Burden at Northland Pioneer College

Vanessa Turke — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 21:21:54 +0000

Northland Pioneer College (NPC) is a regionally accredited, publicly supported, comprehensive community college serving a large and diverse area in Navajo County, Arizona.The College offers over 8,000 courses college-wide during fall and spring semesters, approximately 2,000 courses during summer sessions, and distance education courses via the internet throughout the year.

NPC came to ImageX Media for a scalable content management system after college staff felt increasingly burdened by manual website updates. ImageX Media first held consultations with key staff members to help reorganize their site content with an extensive information architecture process before proceeding with theming a fresh new design and configuring time-saving features into the new Drupal site.

To help streamline the content publishing process, ImageX media created workflow automation so that NPC’s web-systems can now handle many repetitive tasks that were being done by administrative staff by hand. As well, we provided comprehensive training for the school’s IT staff so that all systems and infrastructure are now managed in-house. Drupal provides a robust, pluggable caching system that allows for caching all public facing pages. Block caching is available for logged in users who are served dynamic individualized pages, caching some static content while allowing customized pages to be served. In addition to caching pages, Drupal has built in facilities to consolidate and compress CSS and Javascript files, reducing files sizes and minimizing HTTP requests.

For more details on this project, check out our portfolio.

CASRAI launches new Drupal site

Vanessa Turke — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 21:17:11 +0000

The Consortia Advancing Standards in Research Administration Information (CASRAI) is an independent, not-for-profit organization dedicated to standards development. It is the mission of CASRAI on behalf of the research administration industry to make data sharing possible without dependency on specific software, platforms or systems in order to allow researchers to maintain one copy of their data and to reuse it reliably everywhere. CASRAI also develops data standards that are both open and technologically neutral.

ImageX Media created a powerful new website for CASRAI with a sophisticated new design and a superior feature set with multilingual capabilities that will ease administrative burdens and will provide a solid platform for future growth.

For more details on this project, check out our portfolio.

Buschlen Mowatt Gallery launches their elegant new Dupal-based website.

Vanessa Turke — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 21:03:46 +0000

Over the past three decades Buschlen Mowatt Gallery has become the most high-end commercial gallery in Western Canada, and is among the most reputable galleries in the country. This fall marks thirty years of success and continued growth, and will be celebrated with 18 months of events, museum quality shows, and a city-wide media campaign.

For Galley administrators, Drupal was a natural choice for their new website for it’s flexibility. Administrators are able to publish news to the site as well as update their artist and exhibitions listings with ease.

For more details on this project, check out our portfolio.