Longsight recently helped Magnum Photos and The Global Fund launch a new Drupal-powered focus site: Access To Life.
The multimedia-heavy site documents the work of eight Magnum photographers as they "portray people in nine countries around the world before and four months after they began antiretroviral treatment for AIDS." The print exhibition is currently on view at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC, from June 14 to July 20, 2008. The exhibition will then travel to Mexico City, Paris, London, Berlin, and Rome throughout 2008 and 2009.
The Drupal-based site makes use of many strong, third-party modules including:
- Imagecache: dynamic image resizing for teasers
- SWF Tools: easy JavaScript embedding of Flash assets
- Views: the phenomenally-powerful module that allows flexible queries and displays of content
- Views Podcast: extends the views module to build an iTunes-compliant RSS feed
- Google Analytics: an easy module that allows caching of the GA JavaScript code and outbound-link tracking
- Javascript Aggregator: bundles all JavaScript files into one static file
- Image Caption: automatic image captions using JQuery
- Video: allows uploading (and conversions) of video assets; powers the video podcast section of the site
- Boost: static page serving for high-traffic sites
The site also makes use of Lighttpd to serve all static, Flash assets. The high-definition videos on the site are often 50mb - 60mb downloads. Offloading the video assets to a dedicated HTTP server like Lighttpd allows the heavier Apache connections to remain free for Drupal / PHP processing.
