Department of Architecture, MIT

In January 2011 we approached Franco Vairani of Squared Design Lab (Los Angeles, CA) regarding getting involved in their project to redo MIT's (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Department of Architecture web site.

After many conversations on site architecture as well as getting the school onboard with the need to expand beyond the abilities of their existing site; work on this project got underway in August 2011. Squared Design Lab created the overall look of the site; while LiquidCMS converted this to a Drupal 7 theme. We of course also created the site's backend architecture.

The new site was launched at the end of October 2011 using Drupal 7. As one of our first Drupal 7 projects; this project came with it some challenges of a few modules not quite "ready-for-prime-time". Drupal 7 also provided some design efficiencies as well as greatly extending the life expectancy of the project.

Some of the technical highlights of the project include: 

• custom field module which allows a Course editor to choose which images from related Projects to use for the Course's gallery. It then locks out those images from being removed by the Project members
• Panel overrides for all node types and user profiles
• Discipline based contexts for managing colour theming throughout the site
• extensive use of image tools such as imagecache (core in D7), image_crop and views_slideshow