Wanna Play Drupal? I mean Music!

Built in Drupal 5.7

NAMM (the International Music Products Association) launched their WannaPlayMusic.com site this week, coinciding with Music Week, May 5th through the 9th.

The new site, which encourages the world to pick up a musical instrument and play, was built using Drupal 5.7, a lot of design and theming, and a few custom modules. The site features celebrity musicians and actors, upcoming events, daily coverage of Music Week, and a library of music articles. You can also find local music retailers via Google Map integration (written by NAMM's Dan Kessler).

The site tackles the digital gap challenge by detailing the technicaladvancements that are changing the "tune" of today's music industry.

This project is an excellent example of using Drupal to create a world class site in a very short period of time. Raincity Studios turned around a great design in a very short time frame, and Achieve Internet themed and configured like madmen, going from wireframes to launch in just 30 days.

Technical Details:

• Extensive use of taxonomy, which let us set up views to handle displays effectively. For the content type Article, views can be set as News, Get Started, or Wanna Play Music, and can further be free-tagged with any relevant info.
• Nodequeues to allow site admins to promote content to the Wanna Play page, and highlight a musician and event on the homepage
• Panels2 in use on the Wanna Play page and the homepage
• Imagecache used to handle the primary images for all content types
• Views generally created excellent breadcrumbs, but for node pages we used the wonderful custom breadcrumb module to give us the path we wanted.
• FAQ module was very complete and easy to work with
• Simplefeed module with a Google Alerts RSS feed to pull in relevant content
• Dealer locator module connects Google Maps to a locator web service