Bluecadet Interactive

Disruptive Innovation (The Low-End Theory)

Bluecadet producer Victoria Jones and I recently attended a great weekend class organized by Girl Develop It, hosted at Indy Hall. The group can be found on meetup, and is organized in Philadelphia by Yasmine Mustafa. We attended Elise Wei's intermediate class on HTML5 and CSS3.

Starcraft II screenshot by God Mode

Building a website with a CMS is beneficial as it allows you or your clients to create and maintain content with limited or no knowledge of HTML or the underlying site structure. However, when your site is at the front line of an international social campaign or unexpectedly featured on the front page of Reddit, all the backend logic that makes that all possible suddenly starts to work against you. It takes time for your CMS to render a web page and as your first visitors are waiting for the site to render, additional visitors can start to overwhelm your server.

photo by artnoose on Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

One of the things that makes Drupal so powerful and flexible is the ability to use its “hook” system to override/extend items as they are assembled, before they get sent to the browser. If you know where to look, you can modify how a particular piece of content is rendered in markup. That means that if you want certain items to be marked up a certain way, you can go beyond the default Drupal display settings and craft you output so that it looks exactly how you want it to. Want to make sure that every image on your site has your CSS “fancyborder” class? You can do that using a hook. If this is new to you, I suggest you check out Themery’s excerpts from The Definitive Guide to Drupal 7, which cover how Drupal’s theming/rendering process works.

We’ve been working on a site with fairly deep navigation, and we wanted to add “level” classes to the unordered lists: menu-lvl-1, menu-lvl-2, menu-lvl-3, and so on. I’ve compiled the template functions referenced here in a gist.

Stretching from City Hall, past the Barnes Foundation and the Rodin, to the world-famous Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia's Ben Franklin Parkway is proudly hailed as the "the most artistic mile in the country." The Greater Philadelphia Tourism and Marketing Corporation (GPTMC) sought a website that would showcase the museums on this mile for their "With Art Philadelphia" campaign.

This was an exciting year at the American Association of Museums annual conference in Minneapolis. Bluecadet projects received four MUSE awards, hosted a session on creating interactive exhibits, and attended a party at the Minnesota History Center that included an elderly nun giving free massages.

Steve Hurwitz has an in-depth knowledge of Drupal and PHP, and joins the Bluecadet team as our senior web developer. He’s worked with Actionscript3, Drupal, PHP and more at Red Tettemer, TMX Interactive, and Paragraph Inc. He’s the head of our in-house Drupal development, so here’s a chance to see some of his great work on previous Drupal projects.

Steve's development work for Red Tettemer, designed by Jon Elison.

In the last six weeks we have completed a race to launch four large interactive and online projects. We are out of breath but proud, and warming up for the next round. The iconic image of the Afghan Girl by Steve McCurry