The festival is held annually during Sukkot holiday in Cinematheque Tel Aviv. It attracts thousands of visitors every year. It is managed entirely by volunteers.
I love Science Fiction and I volunteers in the festival staff for a few years, in different roles. In 2008 and 2009 I was a member of the website team.
The Goals
Our goal was to create an informative and attractive website, that will support the festival’s work year round: Enabling the website team to add and edit content on a daily basis; Recruiting volunteers to the festival staff; Enabling lecturers and film makers to submit events to the festival content committees; And of course, enabling visitors to navigate through the festival schedule with ease.
We chose Drupal content management system for the task. The following year, we moved on to create a new and improved version of the website.
The Challenges
The festival schedule was absolutely huge. The website had to display information about hundreds (!) of events, of different types (movies, lectures, games… ) and genres (sci-fi, fantasy, comics…), spanning over 7 days, and no less than 10 (!) venues. So the first challenge was to figure out the best way to display all the events, taking place at the same time, in a manner that will be easy to navigate.
In addition, the system had to support adding events to the schedule (by the festival team). Sometimes, the same event would appear several times. Not to mention, there were constant changes: various constraints caused the festival team to change hours or even locations of events. To deal with this difficulty, we separated between event information and its time slots (instances); So the editor could easily edit a specific time slot of an event without affecting its description or other schedule appearances.
The second challenge was handling the load. In the weeks prior to the festival, the website had to handle thousands of visitors. It was very important that each visitor will be able to find the content that he or she is interested in with ease, and maybe even purchase tickets online. This would take some of the the pressure off the phone lines and keep the costumers happy.
The team
- 1 Backend developer
- 1 Theme developer
- 1 Product manager / site admin
- 1 Visual designer
My role
I organized and prioritized the requirements as collected from the festival manager, festival staff and users. I configured the site settings and backoffice interface for the festival staff.
We were a strong team of four: one Drupal developer, one graphic designer, one Drupal theme designer, and myself – the team leader.
My Role
I met with the festival management several times to analyze requirements, and create extensive and elaborate documents (which later on served us in every step of the process). I coordinated the team’s work and kept to schedule and dead-lines. I was also in charge of the configuration of the Drupal and website administration.