Durham, NC (August 19th, 2011) — DesignHammer, Durham’s award-winning web design and development firm, released a new web-based content management system to host content for the Carolina Theatre’s annual film festival series. The Theatre, a Durham historic and cultural landmark since 1926, hosts four film festivals per year, in addition to daily scheduled film screenings, as well as critically-acclaimed live performances.
The new festival website system proved essential in averting a crisis during the recent NCGL film festival. Trouble struck on August 12th when a pickup truck collided with a nearby transformer pole, plunging the Theatre’s screens into darkness in the middle of several films. According to Aaron Bare, Director of Marketing and Communication at the theatre, “the outage lasted for a couple of hours and we had to send people home, but thanks to our new Drupal site and content management system, we were able to push information out cleanly, easily, and quickly.” The interrupted films were successfully rescheduled online, showing the value of an easily updated website.
Currently in version 7, Drupal is a free and open source content management system (CMS) and content management framework (CMF) written in PHP with over 10,000 community-contributed modules to extend its functionality. The popular CMS is used across a full spectrum of applications, from small business and non-profit websites, to internationally recognized organizations such as the White House, and The Economist online.
DesignHammer hosts Drupal on LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) servers. “A feature-rich, yet robust and scalable framework without licensing fees makes Drupal easy to recommend to our clients,” said Design Hammer Managing Partner David Minton. DesignHammer provides Drupal development to companies and organizations nationwide and has launched numerous cutting-edge Drupal websites.
Prior to the redesign of the film festival web pages, the Carolina Theatre used static websites to publicize each event. The previous websites, independent of the Theatre’s main site, required assistance from volunteers and firms like DesignHammer to update each site’s content annually. The Theatre sought a new setup that would be easier to manage and revise.
Currently only content for the NCGL film festival is hosted by the new Drupal system; the remaining three festivals will be migrated as new content becomes available. Once the new content management system is completed, Theatre staff will be able to update each festival’s site content at will after DesignHammer moves the sites into Drupal. The improved sites feature a responsive website theme that creates both desktop and mobile web editions of the site without requiring two separately developed versions. DesignHammer Partner and Lead Designer Frank Yonnetti stated, “Another significant change is how the film schedule is presented. The new grid layout uses Drupal Views to display each film in its own node-block and organize the films by showing time.”
The Carolina Theatre has employed DesignHammer for website development services since 2008, including a complete redesign of the organization’s main website in 2010, and an iPhone app earlier in 2011.
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