Curzon Community Cinema Website

The Curzon Cinema website is probably the biggest site I’ve completed as a freelancer… so far. And bar a little advanced web development by the Diversity cms team and content population by the clients web guy (Andy Darvill) it was pretty much all done by me. So here’s a few of my thoughts on it.

Getting the Job

Getting this pretty cool project was a lot easier than I’d expected. I just asked for it. Quite simply.

Being fresh into freelance at the time I was looking for quite a locally high profile project that would have the bonus of a bit of publicity. The Curzon is a charity run cinema that’s been showing films since 1912, one of the oldest running cinemas in the world I believe. So it passed the ‘high profile’ mark! I’d also noticed the Curzon had received Heritage Lottery Funding and was having a lot of work done so timing seemed about right. So I went to go meet Gareth and now here I am writing about it.

Curzon Website Design

Design

The initial design was easy enough. The Curzon had just gone through a design process with an interior/exhibition space designer and wanted the new website to match the new style inside the building. Luckily the interiors style lent itself quite well to a web layout and all went rather smoothly.

Build

Thanks to Diversity CMS‘ awesome templating system the build was reasonably easy. Early on we had agreed to keep to a slightly altered site map and the same content as the previous site. So after a bit of wireframing it turned out I only needed to code up 9 master templates and 8 generic templates to complete over 60 pages. After the coding, all that was left was the large volume of content population.

Curzon Data Spreadsheet Import

Movie Scheduling System

Wow! This took some brain effort! I planned from the start to make the movie scheduling system as automated as possible and requiring the minimum user of time and effort to maintain. Especially as the schedule is referenced across multiple pages. And of course, hit all that without involving any extra development time from the Diversity CMS guys and so incurring more cost.

After a whole lot of coffee and a bit of head scratching I finally nailed it! I managed to combine Diversity CMS‘ standard datalist system (kind of a micro database system) with a recently developed spreadsheet/Excel import function. So with a few clicks the Curzon can upload and publish a complete schedule and Diversity will automatically sift through the data and put the movies in the correct places based on a category basis. Even the accordion slider on the home page is populated, deduplicated and ordered automatically. And of course, after all that, once the movie has been shown it’ll automatically remove itself from the website. What a well behaved webste!

I was feeling quite chuffed with myself after all that. Go me!

Conclusion

It was pretty neat to work on this project for the Curzon Cinema. I have some quite fond childhood memories of watching Tom & Jerry cartoons on a Saturday morning.

But from a more technical point of view, I honestly don’t know how I could have built this site and scheduling system without the flexibility of Diversity CMS. I’ve got experience with other content management systems, like Wordpress and Concrete5, so feel I can safely say I don’t think I could have built the Cuzons site to its current specification with them. Rock on Diversity CMS! Go check it out, and of course check out www.curzon.org.uk.

And if you’re in the area, go watch a film at the Curzon. It’s the only cinema I know that still has an organist playing before the film! So cool!