LAMDA (London Academy of Music, Drama and Art) is one of the most prestigious dramatic arts schools in the world. The website, encompassing it’s new brand identity created by Hudson Fuggle, contains vast amounts of information for a variety of audience, students, prospective students, the general public, staff, teachers of the arts and those who teach or take LAMDA exams. LAMDA needed a new site to provide access to all this rich content and information in a manageable and efficient way.
Key features
Fully responsive site
Interactive events calendar
Spektrix e-commerce integration
Password protected intranets
Admin training
About the project
One of our tasks was to rebuild the site with the integration of Spektrix, providing a platform for ticket bookings and sales. Transactions are completed off site and integrated into the Drupal system.
The LAMDA site needs to provide a vast amount of information, from courses to latest shows, and lots of downloadable content, such as pdf prospectuses and timetables. It was essential to ensure this content is easily uploaded, managed and accessed.
We were also required to give the new site an updated look and feel, supporting an academy-wide rebranding, as well as resolve the severe operational issues they had with managing their existing site. Increased user interaction was another aim; a user log in function grants different users access to internal intranet pages - for example, students can log in find personalised information regarding their current course.
Why Drupal was chosen
LAMDA's previous website was written in a bespoke CMS which was limited in functionality. Ownership of code was unclear, and a lack of documentation and clarity regarding the system's architecture meant that hiring in a developer to take this on would be problematic. We were able to explain that a 'contributed-first' approach within Drupal would help overcome these obstacles.
As the LAMDA site is an ongoing, growing site, Drupal is also ideal in that it allows for a good upgrade path, and integrates with how miggle deploy sites across a multisite environment using the Jenkins CI server.
Technical Specifications
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
The getlocations module was used in the ‘find a teacher’ section of the site, where students can search for teachers within a particular radius using Google maps. Media modules were needed to display content from Soundcloud and YouTube, and securepages was brought in to support Spektrix booking pages.
