Band on the Wall
I was approached by new agency Cahoona to produce the CMS and social media driven site for the iconic Manchester music venue, Band on the Wall.
The concept was simple – to create a community around the venue and build upon the idea that gigs shouldn’t end as soon as the final member of the crowd leaves the venue. Rather, those attending the gig should be able to share their experiences through comments, photographs and videos allowing the gig to live on through a permanent online presence.
Cahoona created the design, overall concept, and managed the project and client whilst I delivered the functionality which included amongst other things:
- Full bespoke CMS
- API integration with Last.fm, CampaignMonitor, Flickr, YouTube and Vimeo
- Social media/user area with friends, comments and direct messages
- Events calendar
- Ability for staff and users to share images, videos and documents for events
- Simple online store including ticket sales (for educational courses) and charitable donations
- Comprehensive tagging and site search
- News engine
- RSS feeds for content
Best bits
This site is actually very large and if I were to cover every detail of it – it would take too long. However, there are some great bits within the system that I am particularly proud of:
Simple intuitive AJAX tag selection
Both the front and backend of the site feature really easy ways to add tags or in the case of the above screengrab – musical genres.
Easy to use, yet powerful search
Search for a band/artists and you’ll get back all the gigs they’ve played or are playing at the venue — and any content in which they feature on the site. Search results are clearly defined as to what type of content they are so users can quickly see what they’re getting if they click through.
Simple content population
The Band on the Wall team needed to be able to easily add content. With that in mind the popular Tiny MCE software was modified to ensure it was as easy as possible to add images and links from the site to the content whilst maintaining the semantics and accessibility of the HTML code and preserving the design.
Simple solutions to large dataset issues
Band on the Wall’s new site currently contains over 2000 events and 1500 artists each occupying a row in the database. This presented issues when the staff wanted to set up a new gig. They couldn’t simply select the relevant artist from a 1500 strong drop down list. Step forward AJAX to the rescue:
Speed
All database calls on the site are cached locally after their first call which speeds up the site by as much as 260% on some sections. In development, PHP page rendering speeds were very carefully monitored to ensure minimal load on the database and with a view in mind of visitors having a good experience — and not a slow one. Undoubtedly there will be times when — despite the venue’s modest capacity — the server could get significant interest if a very strong act is booked. The website has been built with this in mind at every stage and it should cope.
Project management
This was a fairly sizeable project, I was initially brought in to consult and quote for the project in November 2008 with the project going live in July 2009. All in all, there was around four months of development work spread over that time.
This project also saw me outsource a sizeable portion of work for the first time in my career. As the project deadline loomed Tim Fletcher helped me out with frontend work. Frontend development is my core skill and outsourcing parts of this work was a truly weird experience for me. Thankfully it worked out well and being able to concentrate on the backend really sped this project along.
Summary
Less than a month after launch, it’s too early to say how successful the website is. It’s easy to see that it’s a beautifully designed site and initial user feedback has been very positive – but as with every website the measure of success will be seen months down the line when/if visitors numbers can be sustained.
Working on this project was hard and at times challenging due to its sheer size but it was also pleasurable. I feel the design is fantastic and the overall concept produced by Cahoona is very exciting. The way Band on the Wall as an organisation have embraced a website of this nature says a lot about their progressive view of music — and deep understanding of how gigs must work — in this digital age.
Personally, I can’t wait to see how this site evolves as more content is added by staff and users.
Great work for a great venue. I’m old enough to remember it in it’s heyday. The owner used to get up on stage at the end of the night and play sax with the band. Hope it succeeds again
Interesting analysis of the implementation. What (framework) did you use for the bespoke CMS? I’ve come across similar issues with image/link/resource selection. I too have developed a custom picker, but don’t (yet) integrate it with TinyMCE
And what did you use for the search solution. Lucene?
Thanks for sharing
Sadly, I’ve never been to Band on the Wall but I’m really excited about it’s reopening.
I didn’t use a framework for the CMS – I used my own mini-framework for it all. I did contemplate using a framework like Zend or Kohana but only in so much as to make life easier for any future developers.
The search is done using Fulltext search with MySQL5. Results from several tables are brought together in one view and then MySQL Fulltext search functions produces good relevant results.
Good job indeed. I love posts like this that give us a little peek behind the scenes.
Aside from the query caching, are you employing any kind of output cache to assist in performance?
I would love to hear more about your framework. Maybe a post about how you set out to make your own php framework, it’s components, and general organizational structure. I have been using Code Igniter (Kohana was a spin off) and have been thinking about making something custom to better match how we develop sites.
There’s a bit of object caching and local RSS feed caching. Any external data pulled in from APIs is cached too. The HTML isn’t cached – as too much of it is dynamic.
The reason I use my own framework – and calling it a framework is pretty an insult to the creators of proper frameworks – was because the existing ones didn’t suit my needs. I found them all either too big and daunting or too reliant upon PHP4.
Here’s a good link:
http://anantgarg.com/2009/03/13/write-your-own-php-mvc-framework-part-1/
Oh, and any chance you would be releasing your framework? :)
No chance! The amount of time I’d have to put into supporting and answering user’s questions (or ignoring them and damaging my reputation) would render it a very expensive exercise.
Lol. Fair enough, had to ask thou. Thanks for the link, I actually have that bookmarked but never read it…