the russian version of shca.com

we love wordpress, we really do. we love working with the platform and all the things it can do. we just finished a pretty complex build that required a lot of customization. about a year ago our friends at 4corners, designed and built a site for their client Swanke Hayden Connell Architects at shca.com.

they also love wordpress  - as you can tell by their cool site too -  and they did a great job of pushing all the data into a flash front end using the WP cms.  this year they asked us to help them translate shca.com to russian. the task was pretty daunting as the request was to use a single admin login to update both russian and english versions simultaneously. since the site is graphics heavy - with images shown in multiple places and in multiple sizes we had to make sure that all relations were kept AND doubled to display in both version.

the english and russian input fields

first chris implemented qtranslate and had to go through and make sure all the tags were compatible with wp2.5 of the original build. qtranslate is a great plug in and we highly recommend it for anyone looking to do a multi-language build.  we then had to enable russian text fields for every variable entry and hand code whatever wasn’t. the media upload area was particularly difficult, but with some custom plug-ins and general hacks it all came together.

overall radian said that once he learned ‘all the hooks in wordpress’ it wasn’t that bad. we think it came out really good. but if any of our russian friends find any mistakes let us know. and now, if only shca can resolve their dns and have their web address show up in the url bar instead of their ip address, it’ll be even better.

LoveNY

as is usually the case i’m always running late and sept 11, 2001 was no different. by the time i was getting ready to leave park slope for my job on 11th st. and university in manhattan, the towers were hit and getting into manhattan was pointless. gina and i went up on our rooftop to videotape our view. we saw tower one fall a few minutes after we got up top. the plume of dust and debris expanded so fast that we could not see tower two fall. we walked around park slope and everyone was in a speechless daze. by early afternoon dust and ash fell from the sky coating everything in a light gray dust. later that day we saw people who had walked from downtown manhattan back to brooklyn. they were completely covered in gray dust. it was a very surreal sight

love

we finally got into manhattan a couple of days later to check on my apartment on attormey and stanton. manhattan was very solemn and eerie those first few nights. at the vigils in union square park gina and i shot a lot of video and photographs, partly to help us deal with it ourselves. we edited a small piece which was shown on a few cable channels. i’ll have to dig that up. the photographs shown here were featured in the ‘here is new york‘ exhibition and have traveled the globe. they are also in madame tussaud’s permanent exhibit as well as the planned permanent exhibit of the new WTC 9/11 memorial and have been re-printed in many magazines.

hope

http://jamesbeard.org

for all of you foodies out there, you probably already know the james beard foundation. if you don’t, it’s america’s pre-eminent culinary foundation. they have beautiful member dinners produced by the best chefs of the country, along with the james beard awards and many educational programs. we had the honor of being part of the team that took on the huge project of updating a website with thousands of archival entries and daily updates. we never wrote about it before because our blog wasn’t live in early 2008.

although we finished the first phase of jamesbeard.org in april of 2008, we spent the following 8 months adding to the massive structure built on the drupal framework. the site was beautifully designed by our friend scott of simplissimus (with whom we’ve done other projects) and we did all the multimedia and interactive elements along with the build. the site currently gets about 37,000 hits a month.

anyway, fast forward… the reason we’ve decided to write about it now, is because today is the last entry day for the w3 awards (yes, yes, i’m always running late - but we make the deadlines). we think it’s a really beautiful and comprehensive site and therefore we decided to enter it in the the food and beverage category. so if any of you out there have any pull with the w3 awards judges —-> nudge, nudge, wink wink.