Drupal In Ireland - Project Series

The Irish Drupal community is delighted to welcome you to DrupalCon Dublin and offers you a “céad míle fáilte” - a “hundred thousand welcomes”!

We hope you are looking forward to DrupalCon Dublin as much as we are. It's looking like it will be a fantastic event with lots of great sessions lined up, Trivia Night and of course, the Drupal Ireland Welcome Party!

Many of you know some of us from past events and from our involvement in the community (and of course from our infamous Trivia Nights!). However, Drupal is more than a hobby for us. With Drupal we're able to create amazing online experiences, that deliver so much more than just a website to our clients. With it we've been able to help people learn sign language, go back in time, and get involved in our country's centenary commemorations.

This week, we will be sharing some of the cool projects we've been doing recently with Drupal in Ireland.  

Project 1 - Ireland.ie

It’s very rare that you get to develop your country’s national website for the centenary year of one of the most pivotal events in the country’s history, yet this is what Annertech had the privilege of doing. In this case, www.ireland.ie –  the official website for commemorations of the 1916 Rising – was going to be no small task.

Along with our partners ZeroG and BigO Media a website, beautiful in design, scope, and execution was born, raised, released, rinsed and repeated – iteration upon iteration. Whilst ZeroG and BigO worked on information architecture, content and social media strategy, and design, Annertech worked on making the designers’ dreams a reality. 

We developed a ‘co-lingual’ website, placing Irish and English content side-by-side wherever possible to give equal prominence to the display of both languages. We did the same on the backend, so editors could edit both languages in tandem and keep perfect track of where they stood in the translation workflow. Layout made heavy use of masonry, transition effects, and hover/focus states to allow for the maximum of information to be presented in small spaces in a beautiful, intuitive manner. In effect an events listing website (though so much more besides), we utilised Apache Solr for lightning fast results and supplemented the events search implementation with a beautiful date picker user interface.

Are we happy with the results? You bet. So much so that we can’t wait to discuss some of the implementation during one of our DrupalCon sessions. Was the Irish government happy with the results? With this being their response, we certainly think so: “Their work was very thorough, expertly executed and often required working under tight deadlines and under extreme pressure. No task was too difficult and they also approached every challenge with a positive solution focused approach."

Project website: Ireland.ie

Agency: Annertech