Mediums finder

Since version 4.6, taxonomy has been a key feature of the Drupal core installation which is why, when Winsor & Newton came to Catch Digital looking for a way to classify and sort through their selection of products Drupal was the obvious choice. Built in Drupal 6, the Winsor & Newton product finder is a fun and easy way to find the most suitable Winsor & Newton products for an arts project.

Roles: 
  • Drupal setup and deployment
  • Theming
  • Drupal site-specific module development
  • Multi-region configuration (English, Chinese, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Finnish, Swedish)
  • jQuery animations and ajax views querying
Challenges: 
  • Queueing multiple AJAX requests using AJAX Manager
  • Showing filter options only available to the current query
  • Multiple languages (Drupal 6 documentation is particularly limited especially when it comes to taxonomy translation)

Views, JSON and jQuery

Winsor & Newton home page

The development process started with the task of creating a jQuery prototype, allowing me to focus on the front-end graphics and animation. After tweaking and experimentation, the designs were finalised and the prototype was approved by the client. The final step was to integrate the prototype with Drupal and create an iFrame embeddable widget for Facebook and use on the Winsor & Newton website. Using JSON, I was able to load all the product data in one go and filter directly using Javascript speeding up responsiveness and offloading server-side load to the client-side.

Multilingual
(interface and products)

This was the second commercial multilingual project I'd undertaken using Drupal and one of many commercial multilingual websites I'd worked on in London. Particular attention was given to making sure all strings used in the interface, email templates and nodes were translatable. Drupal 6's multilingual features, although quite complete, can be challenging to implement and translating vocabularies descriptions in particular proved difficult. The site was simple and logical to translate and was translated by Winsor & Newton in-house without the need for developers.