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The Hampstead Arts Festival is being revived and needed a new website. It has just a few events scheduled this year but has ambitions to grow. It is a charitable organisation and is run by enthusiastic volunteers. So, my priorities from the CMS point of view were to make it as easy as possible for the client to maintain and keep it looking current and to allow for future growth in the number of events and "musings" (AKA blog entries!).
The event template is at the heart of the site with the 'repeatable' tag used for the artist biographies. The client uploads a single photo for each artist and uses an editable field to select the appropriate thumbnail width for the thumbnail photo(s) displayed on the event listings page. Couch dynamic folders make it simple for the client to add new event categories and for site visitors to filter events by type. Event archiving is in place and will grow year by year in typical blog-style navigation in the right hand column.
I have given the client various choices e.g. whether to have paging on the events listing page and to choose how many upcoming events to display on the home page. He can select events to feature as highlighted events on the home page and the latest musing/blog entry is automatically shown in summary. These small features are straightforward to implement with Couch and provide a really good experience for the client.
When setting up an event there is a dynamically updated dropdown list of venues to select from (see http://www.couchcms.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=7097). So when a new venue is added it will automatically become selectable in the event page.
It has been an interesting site for me in terms of getting to know Couch's capabilities in greater depth. It has been very rewarding to have an idea for a site feature, work out which Couch tag will do the job and implement it with ease. A real pleasure. And whenever I got stuck on anything the forum has been there to help out (thanks KK).
And the client ... he had never used a CMS before and was a little reticent, but he seems to have taken to it like a duck to water. And that is Couch - it gives us web designers power & flexibility and our clients get a beautiful made-to-measure CMS!
The website: www . hampsteadartsfestival . com
