We’re not yet at liberty to reveal its identity, but Palantir is currently at work on a high-profile Drupal site for a design school and art museum at a renowned American university that is currently scheduled for launch just prior to Drupalcon DC.

The site features an envelope-pushing front-end design that makes extensive use of jQuery to allow users to “click-to-slide” between two halves of an extra-wide two-pane layout, which is generated entirely at the theme layer. sIFR 3 is used to combine the jQuery visual effects with custom typography. Despite the complexity of the design, the sites are built with Zen using sustainable theming practices and a progressive enhancement approach.

Domain Access is used to power separate sites for the school and the museum off the same Drupal installation, with several enhancements being added to this module for this project.

The project prompted the development of two new contrib modules that will be released prior to Drupalcon DC:
- A new views_cycle module will be used to power Views-based image galleries
- A new fully GPL’d and configurable Flash media player is used for locally hosted multimedia files

The museum side of the site will feature a generic remote data access layer inspired by the Data API Design Sprint hosted by Palantir in February, 2008.

Speakers

The session will feature members of the Palantir team that built the site.