Watershed

Watershed is an independent cinema and all-round hub for arts, culture and creativity in the South West. We helped them by designing an architecture to consolidate their various online properties.

After our initial consultation we got all the stakeholders together for a requirements gathering workshop, where we captured requirements as user stories and employed card sorting to assign each story a priority. This process forces us all to think about the value of each user story in the wider context of the overall project’s success.

Subsequently, we built up a rapid prototype using Drupal and spaces module, a combination enabling you to have separate ‘spaces’ within a Drupal installation that can be themed to give the appearance of entirely separate sites. The benefit of this approach is that it allows site admins to easily publish and share content between spaces. We also built a workflow system to work in harmony with the Watershed’s existing editorial process, while facilitating sharing of content between departments that have historically suffered from digital segregation.

This prototype forms the basis of the next development phase, nothing is wasted. We trained the development team on how to build out functionality using this spaces, features, and context-based architecture to adhere to Drupal best practices. We’ve written a blog post soon on using Spaces to create a multisite-like architecture, it’s an new and powerful approach that has been largely overlooked.

Watershed screenshot

What the client says

John’s skill lies in being able to very quickly understand requirements and come up with a creative solution to the problem that draws on the very latest knowledge and techniques.

His obvious experience in not only delivering top notch technical solutions but also in gathering requirements in a very user focussed way has given everyone the confidence that we now have a great solution to our problem – not only conceptually but also coded and ready to implement.

In addition his clarity and genuine approachability for both technical and non-technical staff makes him a fantastic asset to a project

David Redfern
Watershed