World Science Festival

Project Outline:

Designed by Spitfire Interactive and developed by Six Feet Up under Abstract Edge's direction, the new site is powered by the Plone 3 open source Content Management System. Visitors can browse and search for details about the festival various events, the participants, the organizers, as well as the various event locations.

Two-way links between objects made the dynamic view of related information rather simple to manage: detail event pages provide links to the biographies of the people participating and links to the venue location pages; conversely, participants' pages display links to their related events.

The various challenges of listing close to 100 participants in the appropriate categories of speakers, advisors, moderators, organizers or/and members of the founding team prompted Six Feet Up to implement an ingenious mechanism to allow site administrators to easily manage people’s profiles, positions and display order.

The Plone default dynamic navigation system was also heavily modified to provide more flexibility in the choice and order of the displayed links throughout the site. Moreover, Six Feet Up leveraged the open source JavaScript and Adobe Flash based technology sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement) to enable the dynamic replacement of text elements on the main navigation bar and page banners with graphical Flash equivalents.

Six Feet Up deployed the new site onto their own servers using a clustered Zope application server with Pound acting as the load balancer. Six Feet Up set up Nginx to do the rewriting while Squid has been handling the reverse HTTP acceleration. As a result, the World Science Foundation site has stayed snappy and responsive despite hefty traffic increases.