MV Scheßlitz
The Musikverein Scheßlitz needed their old website replaced, because it was not up-to-date anymore – due to the lack of a (simple) content management system, all changes had to be done by an administrator manually.
Design
The orchestra was renewing it’s whole Corporate Identity; they had a new logo designed, so my site was required to match the logo’s color scheme.
After several design proposals the design was handcrafted into valid XHTML1.1 and CSS up tp level 3, while preserving the best possible result for older browsers, namely Internet Explorer 6. Some visual gimmicks are only avaiblible for users of CSS3-capable browsers via progressive enhancement.
Content Management
I reviewed a couple of open source content management systems to choose the one that would fit the site’s purpose – the system needed to be able to manage various different content types, e.g. appointments, downloads, images, articles, news and it had to be possible to integrate a 3rd party gallery (preferrably using the same logins for the gallery and the main site).
A forum might later be integrated into the site aswell, so a forum module or a bridge to other forum software definitely was a plus aswell.
Although I had never used it before, I chose to to realize this project on top of Drupal 6. Drupal’s flexible extension system and the huge extension repository provided me with a great set of tools to build the site’s parts. Drupal’s templating system was daunting at first, but nonetheless very powerful in the end.
The site is available at http://www.mv-schesslitz.de/.
