The Client: Bedlam creates some of the most interesting and original theater in Minneapolis. They run their own production and, in addition, rent their space to other groups. This means they have a large number of events to keep track of and promote,  and they needed a site that could accommodate them all.

My Role: Having designed, built and maintained their version 1 site, I was keenly aware of the workflow issues and front-end pros and cons that they were experiencing. I worked with them to find the new look and feel of the site and to expand the functionality. In the end, the new site was built on WordPress, with collaborative design and unique plugins.

The Technology: One of the initial hurdles of this site was importing the existing years of data into WordPress, including media and event dates. I created a unique plugin for them called TheatreEvents and wrote a custom import script that inserted the new posts and attachments and populated the data. The plugin features direct hooking into the admin interface so that event data entry is in the same form as post entry.  On the front-end, the plugin allows for sorting by the event dates and custom week and month views. The plugin will be released publicly soon.

The Highlights: Weekly calendar in the sidebar of most pages with Ajax navigation. Monthly calendar of events.

The Client: Steven Lang needed a site to show his work and needed it to be congruent to his approach and style.

My Role: Development of light-weight, custom CMS to allow the artist to easily update the site. Mr. Lang had a clear idea of how he wanted the site to look and act, and asked me to make the site a reality.

The Technology: The site is built on PHP and MySQL. It features custom JavaScript for the gallery interactions and uses a few CSS tricks to keep the background’s ceiling and floor in place at almost any resolution.

The Highlights: Implementation of the artist’s design vision, unique and JavaScript gallery interaction.

Also, here’s my original post about this generation of the site.