Today, I launched the new and long overdue Quiet Company website. I’ve worked with them a number of times in the past, but this project was significantly more ambitious.

The goals for the site were essentially threefold:

1. Replace MySpace’s now largely irrelevant calendar feature with a centralized location for shows,
2. Integrate with the band’s already strong social network presence,
3. Give fans a centralized space to communicate and share content.

I was able to take the basic structure of the site from a previous Drupal band site, Weather Maps. The basic calendar functionality desired was already there, they just wanted an alternate “poster” view of upcoming shows in addition to the traditional “calendar” view.

The social network integration module landscape in Drupal isn’t very well documented, but there are a couple modules that proved at least decent. The Twitter module was difficult to set up, but once configured, worked very well (the problem in configuration came in its poorly documented dependency on an outdated version of the oauth module). I also decided to forego default Drupal comments in favor of Facebook’s social plugins, which are implemented quite well by Facebook Social. My primary complaint here, though very minor, is that “like buttons” can be configured to appear on nodes in the “links” section, while the “comments” box cannot and must be parsed manually from the node body when using a custom node template.

The most challenging part of the site was user uploaded content. Essentially, each user, designated a “fan” (by default), is allowed to create content of the specific type “fan content” for each show which has already occurred. I wrote a small, custom module to handle all of the subtleties of the form handling and built several views to display all of the contents of those nodes on the respective show pages (as well as the user’s page).