Dance Studio sites

[spcherub]

I'm pleased to announce the launch of the Fred Astaire New York Dance Studio site for the Westside and Eastside studios. The designs are very similar but each site has its own instance of CMSMS as the content is different (or will be eventually).

In addition to the base CMS (1.9.4.2), I've used the following modules to run the site:
- Gallery 1.4.4 (for the Gallery section)
- Showtime 2.0.4 (for the hero slideshow)
- FormBuilder 0.7
- GBFilePicker 1.3
- Sitemap Made Simple 1.2.2
- CGSimpleSmarty 1.4.8
Thanks to the authors for developing and maintaining these excellent modules.

The site are http://fredastairenewyork.com/westside and http://fredastairenewyork.com/eastside
There is a static landing page at http://fredastairenewyork.com that includes a link to a separate site for the Midtown studio.

I've tried to make the main content section modular so the user can customize the individual content modules that display and the order in which they show up. So for instance the "Our Team" page is dynamically generated from all the sub-pages under that main page. The author creates a separate page for each team member, but those pages usually never display on their own. Instead I use a combination of the MenuManager and CGSimpleSmarty to combine content from all the sub-pages pages into the main page. I've used this approach when I don't have special-purpose modules to handle specific types of content. I suppose I could have used the News module, but I wanted to keep that for future expansion when the sites will be generating real "news".

Please click around and let me know what you think, feel and experience. All comments/criticisms are welcome.

Thanks,
Sanjay

[paulbaker]

Very smart, like it.

Was there a reason you went for Google Calendar over, for example, the CGCalendar module? (Not a critisism, just wondering...)

[spcherub]

@paulbaker: Thanks for the compliment. Regarding your question about CGCalendar, there were two issues that I was dealing with:

1. The Google calendar is already being used by the administration & staff of the studios (multiple people) and needing them to transfer all the events *AND* learn a new system was going to be next to impossible

2. We wanted to get something out quickly, so I decided to do the iframe embed for now, but will probably follow soon with a module that can consume a feed from GCal and do some caching etc. (I saw one on the forge but did not have time/bandwidth to implement it. Also it seemed to have a dependency on the ZEND framework and I did not have time to chase that down)

Thanks,
S

[uniqu3]

Very nice and clean, i like the choice of colors and headings font.
As there is allot of content it is a pleasant feeling reading it with above mentioned choice.

Only one small critique would be Gallery template, this could use some detail love.

[spcherub]

@uniqu3: Thanks for the comments and critique. You make a good point about the Gallery - I got lazy and except for replacing the page nav buttons, simply used the default template out of the box. Now that the sites are launched perhaps I will look into doing those better - any specific suggestions for the layout there?

Thanks,
S

[uniqu3]

I know the feeling, i get lazy to

As a suggestion i would probably first set Gallery summary page (preview images) to crop so these are equally sized, then always have 3 in a row on a Gallery page, give preview images a background for example color of page background or something, some padding so background is also visible and maybe use heading font for titles (depends if it looks any good when smaller).

On Gallery detail page a simple change in border color should be enough and maybe replace that "back" button, could also be a simple text with style of form button.