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The Manchester Hacienda Club

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Ixis worked with Manchester based agency Worship Digital to produce a great multi-media based community site for the legendary Haçienda club brand in Manchester (UK).

The project included the usual News section for promoting upcoming activities and history of the nightclub, and alongside this an events area which allowed pinning an event on the world map using a custom Drupal CCK field.

Media from the past and present was a big requirement to present an archive to the public. Old video footage from as far back as twenty years ago was collated from YouTube and presented as a thumbnail gallery through the use of the YouTube API. The photo gallery provided a categorised collection of the 'then' and 'now' clubbing photos with the fans, artists and DJs which performed. We built the gallery using Views, Attachments, CCK and some custom jQuery for the meta data pop-ups.

Ubercart was used to sell digital downloads of audio singles, mixes and full albums, as well as physical products such as CDs and books. We combined Ubercart with affiliated links to off-site suppliers for some products but kept the look of the Shop as streamlined as possible.

The Haçienda has been well known for its music, so it was important to give visitors a taste of past and present mixes from the famous artists. Using some custom code we provided a voting count as people listened to the audio mixes on-site. Mixes are categories and include links to the artist/DJ bio which also ties in with the same Artist bio for the future events.

The project was a great experience in doing a lot of custom theme building from the many superb page designs. It shows how you can make Drupals output look a lot different from the normal linear web forms and blog-like content lists.

The project needed to cater for spikes in traffic as events are promoted in addition to the 24/7 streaming of hour long audio mixes. It was recommended that the project was hosted on transparent scalable hosting from Rackspace in the cloud. To help with the slower speeds of Cloud based hosting in the US we provided additional performance enhancing using the Boost component for Drupal.

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