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First Avenue Rocking with a New Look and D6 upgrade

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PastedGraphic1_eIio1n3GgsC8_Iw0ZkR7vmQEJ.jpgSorry, I couldn’t resist the play on the words. This storied Minneapolis nightclub has been a music mecca since the 70’s, entering the national spotlight in the mid 80’s when it helped launch Prince and was the venue for the classic movie Purple Rain. Level OS first launched the site around 6 years ago on a custom ASP.NET platform (cut me some slack, it was my first project with my own company!). It was migrated to Drupal about 2 and a half years ago, right around v5.2. That version of the site featured a custom Ubercart integration allowing the club to sell both tickets and sightline seats to events, along with regular merchandise, heavy use of CCK and Views for features like blogs, forums, and galleries, sample audio tracks, and an online community. In the ensuing two years, both the code base and design lacked the flexibility the site needed, so we updated both. Side note: It’s amazing what passed in my book for Drupal best practices 3 years ago! The upgrade process was, well, extremely painful to be blunt, and this coming from a fairly experienced Druapler. The challenges we encountered included:

  • Some problems migrating modules from D5 to D6 versions. E.g., Ubercart changed the structure of a products data object, but existing data wasn’t updated and the change wasn’t clearly documented. The changes were not complex, but they were mostly only discovered through trial and error.
  • Migrating from the Event module to Date/Calendar/CCK.
  • Theme updates
  • Custom module updates
  • Migrating to the use of true best practices
  • The site is fairly heavily trafficked, with lots of new content daily, so nearly all the configuration updates were codified.

The new site, while still having lots of room for improvement, is finally coming into its own and features the following.

  • Still using Ubercart, now in a much more mature state, for selling tickets and reserved table seats for select events, both of which have their own inventories, along with merchandise. The former is accomplished by taking advantage of a few UC hooks along with product attributes.
  • Event system with JQuery carousels on the front page, listings grouped by day with heavily themed rows, and iCal feeds. The usual tools were employed, including CCK, Date, Calendar, and Views modules.
  • Very active Blog
  • Venues, with mapped locations and a list of events in each venue

Big thanks to Annette Brooks on her amazing design skills and to RJ Steinert for his theming help. Happy to answer any questions about implementation or the tools that were used, and, of course, feedback very welcome.

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