A perfect design match - Drupal and Charles Rennie Mackintosh
78 Derngate is a unique location, being the only house in England designed by the great Scottish architect and designer, Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Strictly speaking it's the interior of the house that was designed by Mackintosh. After suffering neglect for many years, the house was converted to a museum some years ago and restored to its original state. It also had a website but given that the house is a design classic, forming the centre of an award-winning musuem, the website failed to meet that standard. We redeveloped it in Drupal, with a brief to produce a site with fairly simple functionality that was also beautiful.
The risk from a design perspective is to try and 'do a Mackintosh' on websites, which runs a risk of producing a twee re-formulation of some of the classic MAckintosh touches, fiddley roses and inappropriate fonts. Instead we focused on the look of the musuem itself, using high-quality photographs as the basis for the design, with a hint of Mackintosh style in the image layout. As you move through site sections, you get some variation such as changing top banners:
As you can see from this part of the site, it aims to bring typical Drupal functionality to the musuem by supporting a Friends organisation, and publicizing both a regular programme of events and the facility hire for weddings and other functions. Drupal provides booking forms that can easily be adapted for events in the future, and can support a full online membership system with booking renewals done online, reminders sent, and memberships cancelled where payment is not made.
Technical details:
The main technical issue here was themeing Drupal to produce a fairly custom home page that remains consistent with the rest of the site where functionality becomes more complex. In this case it's largely done by producing a theme with multiple regions and then using front-page blocks for displaying content. Behind the scenes it uses the date and calendar api for displaying events, and a combination of FCKEditor and IMCE for inline image placement in a rich text editor. There are a couple of slideshows using ad adapted version of mono slideshow although that might be replaced with views slideshow or a javascript carousel to avoid the need for having any Flash on the site. If you want to know more we are generally at the Drupal Yorkshire meetings.
Website:
78 Derngate