Ciudad.com

Together with our design partner, ABZ Comunicación, we re-designed the Ciudad.com site, a high traffic show business news site. The site is implemented using Drupal 6 and we were responsible for implementing the new look and feel.

One of the most challenging aspects of the project was to be able to easily change the layout of the home page. In the course of the day the editors wanted to be able to update the news and layouts as they happened. For this we developed a new Drupal module so that the users could move around parts of the layout using drag and drop.

The module had many interesting features. The whole home page could be thought of as a stack of bricks. Each brick had slots which can hold news items or blocks of content with a definite layout. The user can re-oreder these bricks up and down, remove them or add new ones. In addition articles can be dragged from one slot to the other.

The home page is divided into horizontal bricks. Each brick has slots where content can be inserted.

The blocks can be re-ordered up or down using drag and drop.

The editor can add new bricks selecting them from a list of pre-configured items.

The articles can be dragged from any slot to any other slot so that news items can be easily re-arreanged.

The slots have links so that the user can quickly edit items by clicking on a link.

With a simple command the user can publish the current home page.

The system keeps track of all changes to the home page. The user can remove versions, return to any stored version or publish the current or a prior version.