Aloha! We had our final Hacker Wednesday of the summer yesterday and much progress was made on the Beta release of the New Artists Productions website. We created custom templates for Suffusion to get rid of a few features that we could not remove using the “Suffusion Options” editor, such as disabling comments in certain areas of the site and breadcrumb navigation. We also covered a few formatting basics to add multimedia content to the site such as slideshows and photographs. We also created a backup of the website to preserve all of the hard work that we have done this summer. Again, we plan to document all of this in the form of tutorials on our website, and release any code developed during our program to support other groups who want to build a site using the same tools we did. We also plan to write the developer of Suffusion, Sayontan Sinha, with a few things we discovered while working with his excellent software.

We all learned and accomplished so much working together as a team. All that is left to do between now and the Rural Design Collective Launch Party on September 4th is to finish coding the stage – at that event, we’ll be rewarding our mentees, Jenn and Oceana, for their wonderful contributions to our project and begin sending out rewards to our generous Kickstarter backers.

Thank you for helping make 2011 another incredible year!

News from #rdcHQ – we are deep in the code working on the animated stage. A few revisions to the layout were made based on feedback from New Artists Productions. The idea is to get the photography to be front and center so it can effectively tell the story – (the logo will animate on stage before the slideshow).

We also made a quick thumbnail video of the animated curtain. This is just a rough draft – timing is off, and details will be refined.

More to come …

Today at Hacker Wednesday … we began a very productive session by working with Oceana’s stage art and rearranging it a bit to be more web friendly. We took a look at some other web sites in the same space (including Disney) and decided to make the target resolution of the splash page 1024 x 768 pixels.

Revised stage mockup by the WordPress Crew at #rdcHQ

The new arrangement leaves ample space for our signature animation and navigation, and we now have a showcase area directly below this visual centerpiece to highlight current shows and photographs from rehearsals and productions (this is a very smart new feature as both Dan and Anita Almich are excellent photographers). We have also chosen an elegant, uncluttered layout in a conscious effort to resist the trend to clutter a design with too many navigational options and too much information. Our goal is to tell a story through photography and build the New Artists Productions brand (by highlighting the excellent logo which was also designed by Dan and Anita Almich). We also have a lot of ideas on how we can use the available space to highlight sponsors and/or build networking opportunities with other area organizations and businesses. There is a lot of room for New Artists Productions to grow into their new website!

Greetings from #rdcHQ! We made great progress yesterday building out the navigation on our “VERY ALPHA” website! Jenn successfully created secondary and tertiary navigation options using the “Pages” and “Menu” controls in WordPress and the “Theme Skinning” capabilities of Suffusion:

Suffusion/WordPress navigational goodness by Jenn Covington

We weren’t sure this would be possible without modifying the underlying template code, but we only had to make one small change to the template CSS file in order to keep the text from wrapping on the menu options. We’ll release this code as a patch along with the tutorials we create for our project. The goal is to make minimal changes to any theme files to simplify the upgrade path. We want new menu items to be easy to add and software upgrades to be painless for New Artists Productions. We still have a few stylistic changes to make to the navigation, but now the architecture is in place and we can start building out the site.

We started the first phase of adding more content to the Scrapbook area of the site. The Newspaper Articles section now contains many more stories about the group (see below), and we have added a section of cast photos highlighting the various performances by the group over the years.

We are waiting on one last derive from the Internet Archive of the Poster History section – we’ve added quite a bit of content including stories behind the set designs, site sketches and letters of appreciation from participants in the program. We will add these to our “VERY ALPHA” site in progress as soon as the build is complete and the files are available.

We’ll be working on the next round of content for the site. Everything is really starting to come together and we’ll be rolling out the site at our Rural Design Collective Launch Party over Labor Day Weekend! Stay tuned!

Groovy “VERY ALPHA” Stage mockup by Oceana Fields