Future Plans for BlazeFoleyMovie.com

So my first Radiant CMS site is for my feature-length documentary film BLAZE FOLEY: DUCT TAPE MESSIAH.

Here’s a list of extensions that look like a promising fit for the site and what I want it to do.

  • quote_du_jour: there are a lot of quotes about Blaze and it might be fun to put them on each page and have them change each day or whatever this extension allows.
  • mobile: no doubt about it, people will be accessing the site using their mobile devices, can’t get around that. I need a way to make it easy to read and navigate.
  • mailer: I need a decent mailer to keep in touch with people, but I may just go with something like constant contact or similar service.
  • haml_filter: I’m a haml fanboy.
  • event_calendar: I like love this extension. Just wanted to put it in this list, even though it’s already installed and working on the site. I’m using it to pull all the film screenings and events from a public Google calendar and list them on the website. Crazy useful.
  • event_mapping: Seems like the perfect companion to event_calendar, I’m hoping it will make it easy to create detail pages for events.
  • taggable_events: Might be useful as a way to group events by region or interest.
  • tailing_slash_seo: Might be silly or might be useful. Apparently, not including the trailing slash to the URL causes a split in Google page rankings.
  • Summary extensions:
    • excerpt: I’m looking for a lazy way to avoid creating a “summary” part for my blog postings. This extension seems to have good features for automatically truncating. But it’s not well documented (no documentation) and this fork seems to be the best one (but I’d probably want to pull patches from other forks).
    • summarize: Another way to create a summary for pages. This extension seems to be the best one and best documented. [Update: this extension is the one I chose for this site. It installed easily and works perfectly. It’s not automatic, you have to insert a tag at the place you want it to truncate. But that suits me just fine, nice and simple.]
    • truncate: Another way to create an automatic summary for pages.
  • vapor: A way to redirect page requests from the old site.
  • asset_packager: Not sure this is needed but anything to speed up initial page downloads will help.
  • shop: As we begin to roll out merch for the film, I may want to sell it directly from the site. Probably not since there are several fulfillment service providers around for everything from on-demand DVDs to t-shirts to posters.
  • site_watcher: Might be a nice alternative or supplement to Google analytics.
  • twitter: Post page titles to your twitter account.
  • twitter_tags: Pull tweets to your site.
  • url_login: Users can log in using a special URL. Might be useful if I implement a paid subscription for new videos.
  • variables: Allow using variables in snippets and layouts to tailor your views. Requires the conditional_tags extension.
  • youtube_tags: An alternate to the oembed extension, which is proving to be challenging for me to implement correctly. I’ll probably stick to YouTube videos for the movie site.

And other sites might use these extensions:

  • shop_packages: I’d like to look at this one for ideas for the cineprovision site.
  • vhost: Might be useful for Deep South Austin’s artist sites. Allows you to host a group of sites from the same Radiant app.