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The Rock Candy Show
The Rock Candy Show a site designed to support a TV show
Location: Boston, Mass USA
Graphics and Coding: Lee Stewart
My first Textpattern site is complete. The content isn’t fully there (not my job) and there are some CSS quirks, but the Textpattern framework is in place. I’m not really a graphics designer and I’m a little unhappy with the logo (it’s sort of dark and detached from the rest of the page). I’ll see what I can figure out.
The site was created from scratch and I put it together quickly. It’s a little ugly (poor combination of CSS and tables). A few of the choices were made in order to unify the look of the website and the graphics used for the show. There’s also things for the set that had to be taken into account, etc.
The tagline of the show used to be “Stars and Guitars”, so you can see where that design element came from. I tried not to overdo the sparklies, but think it works well on the navigation roll-overs.
Let me know your thoughts!
[Lee]
[edit] I made all sorts of changes so this would display properly. The footnotes still don’t work, not sure how to fix them.[/edit]
<hr width=“40%” noshade=“true” />
Technical Notes
All of the text on the site is stored as articles, which makes it easier for someone else to maintain the content. I love Textpattern for that.
Each show is also an article, the Title is the month the show aired and the Body is a list of bands and links to their sites (if any – you’d be surprised at how many bands have packed up and taken their websites with them). This works well with a little form that displays these as a table (more1).
One trick with the shows is that a category is used to organize them by year (and this category is used to display the headers that say “Shows from 200?” (more2)). This gives a nice sub-navigation to the Past Shows section – by default we display the last 12 shows, but each category can be displayed as well.
The “publish at” date is used to tell when a show moves from the past to the current show. This is combined with a custom field that contains when the future episode will be taped. We can book several months in advance and the home page will automatically handle a list of “Next Up” (although there’s some issues with extra paragraph tags) (more3). It works pretty well, though and if the band hasn’t confirmed, we can mark the article as draft (Producers will be able to see all future shows on a separate page. Eventually).
Last we have custom fields for all of the cities that the show airs. The “Now Playing” band lists all of the information about airdates (currently only Somerville MA, but soon the world) (more4). Again this is a nice piece of automation and a producer can input all these details in one place.
Okay, that’s enough on this project – I’m off to work on other things (more5).
And now a musician joke, for those that read through all of this: What did the drummer get on his final exam? Drool!
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fn1. To display shows, I created a form called “table_pastshows” and put the following in my template:
<pre>
<table border=“0” cellspacing=“0” cellpadding=“0”>
<txp:article sortdir=“asc” limit=“12” form=“table_pastshows” />
</table>
</pre>
The form looks like this:
<pre>
<tr><td nowrap valign=“top” class=“show_aired_label” width=“1%”>
<txp:title /></td><td><txp:body /></td></tr>
</pre>
<hr width=“40%” noshade=“true” />
fn2. To make the headers, I resorted to a bit of PHP. This isn’t so pretty, but it works:
<pre>
<txp:php>
echo ‘<img src=“images/header_shows_from_’ . $_GET[‘c’] . ‘.gif”
alt=“Past Shows” width=“510” height=“36”>’;
</txp:php>
</pre>
<hr width=“40%” noshade=“true” />
3 Not sure what to do with the extra paragraph tag around the body of the shows, but the magic of Textpattern prints all future shows with this:
<pre>
<txp:article_custom form=“next_up” time=“future” section=“pastshows” />
</pre>
I like when I don’t have to do any work…
<hr width=“40%” noshade=“true” />
fn4. This time we use a form called “now_playing” and it’s also as simple as the previous form (the body prints out the list of bands). We could have made a check if the custom field for “brooklyn airing” existed and printed that field out too, but I think it’s okay to hardcode this bit.
<pre>
<txp:body />
<p><em>Can be seen in:</em><br />Somerville, MA (channel 3)
– <txp:custom_field name=“somerville_airing” /></p>
</pre>
We only need one show, so we’ll use “limit”:
<pre>
<txp:article_custom listform=“now_playing” limit=“1” section=“pastshows” />
</pre>
<hr width=“40%” noshade=“true” />
fn5. Not to rest on my laurels, I’ve got another site to port over to Textpattern from Blogger. I’ll document this properly for everyone’s use.
Last edited by LeeStewart (2005-08-04 17:17:29)
Monkeys could have written a better post..
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Re: The Rock Candy Show
By the way, as I pointed out – the CSS for the contact form is broken. I’ll work on that when I have a chance. I also want to center the entire page, but need to get other things taken care of first…
[Lee]
Monkeys could have written a better post..
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Re: The Rock Candy Show
Nice site. Problem in Safari… all content is pushed way down the page (on every page).
if this image doesn’t show up, here is the URL http://www.photonomad.com/safariscreenshot.jpg
- stacey
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Re: The Rock Candy Show
photonomad wrote:
Nice site. Problem in Safari… all content is pushed way down the page (on every page).
Ack! Weird – one of the producers is a Mac user and never mentioned the problem. Thanks for pointing it out!
Also thanks for the kind words.
[Lee]
Monkeys could have written a better post..
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Re: The Rock Candy Show
That looks familiar Lee. ;)
Stuart
In a Time of Universal Deceit
Telling the Truth is Revolutionary.
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Re: The Rock Candy Show
Lee, just so you know: I’m using Safari 1.0.3 (v85.8.1) on a Mac running system 10.2.8 (I’m just a bit behind the times…)
- Stacey
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Re: The Rock Candy Show
It’s doing it on Safari 2.0.1 on Tiger for me as well.
Shoving is the answer – pusher robot
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