Dan Noyes on
Before the Christmas break I promised an alpha version of the new website in February, and we're busy working on this now. It's always an interesting phase of a project: you've done your research, you've tested prototypes, you have your content strategy and you already have some markup; all that's left is to build the thing, right?
There are always challenges at this point. Connections to other systems, fighting with your content management system to make it produce the HTML structures that you want for your clean code, architectural and perfomance issues, and a myriad other things.
Here is a screenshot, for example, of what the homepage currently looks like in real, pre-alpha code:
That gorgeous event display from the NA61 experiment is coming through from the 'Casa' application that Silvia has developed to manage events on the homepage. But wait, it's in landscape mode and is pushing the rest of the content off the bottom of the page! We hadn't thought of specifying image orientation or manipulating it (yes, I know, "Duh, obvious!"). So that's a little problem that we have to solve, and the more we get into this building phase, the more of these little problems we're facing and solving.
So this first alpha release is taking time, and we're learning a lot, but we'll try and have it ready for 23 February for you to look at. In this first alpha release the focus will be to have homepage available so that experiments can see what kind of data we're looking for in terms of events. We will also have a fair chunk of the 'About CERN' section that is targeted at the general public (Joanne is the persona we created to represent this audience). The sections targeting the scientific community and the CERN community will not be ready at this stage.
We'll be working with Drupal's native XHTML output for this release, and the focus of the second release will be to rebuild in crisp, clean HTML5 as well as building out the other sections.
Behind all this work we in the communication group are also working on the editorial workflows that will support the new site.
As always, we welcome your questions and comments.
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Comments
HTML5
It's nice that you will build the page in HTML5 :)
What made you take the decision to make it already in HTML5, instead of waiting 1 or 2 years like it was mentioned in the last meeting ?
Cheers, David
Drupal versus HTML5
It makes sense to go straight to HTML5 rather than rebuild down the line. The hesitation I had in my mind during the last Entice meeting where I said that we'd first go with Drupal's native XHTML1 was that we'd have to wrestle with Drupal to do this, and the essential thing to focus on at first was that we build this site, not how clean the markup is under the hood (although I do appreciate this is important - it's a question of priorities).
Right now we've got a bit of a clunky production workflow that goes a little like this:
sketches > crude HTML prototypes > Photoshop design concepts > beautiful HTML5 markup > Drupal XHTML1
The last step is painful, and feels wrong. The alpha that you'll see from 23 Feb will be built like this, using Drupal's native output.
The thing that really changed my mind was the great job that was done on the default CERN theme, which we are now testing. Mark's team did a really great job to get this done in HTML5. They worked with Jen Simmons, who has been a driving force in the Drupal community in moving forwards with HTML5, and is singularly well placed to get this working for us; she's done a terrific job. Having seen what the team managed for the theme, I think it's worth the effort to do the same for the core website.
[By the way, if you'd like to help test the theme, drop by to see me...]
Best,
Dan