How did I get this tan? You are so observant! No I don’t sun bathe on college green, i’m too shy for that. Really this quarter my attention was placed on one thing: Soul of Athens. Yes I got this pasty complexion by spending the quarter with a fantastic group of people, the 2010 SOA web team. (insert heroic music) The amount of time, energy, and pizza spent by this fine group of people is insane. In 10 weeks we cranked out a site that we are all proud of and to top it off it’s the most accessible yet.
On the web team I was on the server side team- we handled Drupal, a content management system that has been utilized by Soul of Athens for the last two years. It is a very powerful open source software. My role was to set up Drupal and create a structure for our site. Organizing how content will enter the site, be collected, and aggregated.
We created a structure that allowed the students to log into the site and fill out our custom forms and that information would appear on the site based on what we asked for. It seems like nothing, someone answers a couple of questions about themselves or fills in the title of their video and it appears on the site after you hit refresh. The first time I saw that I was bubbling over with joy! It was very cool. So all the information you see on the credits page, for the most part, was typed by that student. Same is true for the headline on the content, the description and the transcript. Once the students had filled out their story form for example, we could go in, and upload their video, the thumbnail , and click the aspect ration. In the 9th week we were able to have a gathering of the senior producers and ask them to look over their editions in Drupal and adjust or point out the errors. To have them all logged in and fixing spelling errors, or adjusting descriptions in my opinion made for a better end product. Drupal allowed us to have 60 plus people contribute to the site.
Looking back at what we did and how we went about accomplishing it I would have adjusted a few things. Mostly clarifying the structure of the forms I created, and clarifying exactly how Drupal works to the SOA class. The latter might have helped us avoid a section of Moby Dick being used as transcript filler- thankfully Jill Bateman made a last minute catch. Man that was close! It wasn’t all smooth sailing, but the content management system made the process so much easier than the alternative.
(left to right) Jonathan, me, Corey, Brandon, and the bartender's finger over the lens.
There is no question that the process is intense, and challenging. The process was also fun, and I learned so much alongside my team. Thank you Zach, Brian, Dustin, Tony, John, Corey, Sam, Jill, Jonathan, and of course our fearless (sleepless) leader Brandon.
Christina Baird
Drupal Developer & Marketing Senior Producer
www.christinaeiler.com