About:
Museums and the Web is the annual conference for "tech" and "web" people in the Museum world, with an annual Best of the Web competition across various categories, and a People's Choice Award, where conference attendees and site members have a chance to vote for their single favorite museum website nominee. Bluespark was charged with making these events easier to conduct, along with helping Museums on the Web manage multiple conference events year to year along with related member communications.
BSP Solution:
Bluespark implemented a Drupal 6 platform with a semi-private community, including closed internal groups, public forums, and blog posts. The differentiator? This site, in contrast with many other Drupal conference sites, can be used for multiple conferences each year, with year-to-year updates automated with just a few steps. All information and content across every year is contained in a single database. Each conference year has its own color scheme and sub-theme while retaining a common underlying structure and layout.
Bluespark ported the Best of the Web competition business process from a custom legacy system into Drupal, including website nominee submissions, custom workflows for two rounds of private panelist reviews, voting, a separate general member People's Choice voting system, and results tracking.
There is also a custom workflow for program session proposals for each conference, which also allows a private moderation review process, as well as integration into automated conference calendar scheduling.
Interesting Features
- Use of Organic Groups and OG_MailingList for private multi-group email lists (eg, for yearly Best of Web panelist communications).
- Workflow-ng used for implementing business logic state-changes and workflows for tracking progress of Program Sessions and Best of Web nominees as the lists are narrowed down to finalists.
- Calendar module customizations used to implement the yearly Program session calendar.
- Complex Node Access rules (based on Roles, Authorship, and User_Reference fields eg, for an ability to "assign" someone to review a given node).
- The ThemeKey module was used for theme switching based on the conference year (used for URL path aliases) for which a given node or piece of content was created.