It's been my great pleasure to work with the team at White Bird Dance over the last several years on their website. Not only have they been a great client and warm friends, but I have been exposed to the wonderful world of modern dance and am certainly better off, and more cultured, because of it!

When we first started out I was still knee deep in Microsoft based technologies and we developed the initial site using DotNetNuke. This platform served us well for three seasons, during each of which we updated the design to match the given season's unique style and added new features to keep the site fresh such as blogs and discussion forums. But there were also problems and limitations with that site. DotNetNuke did not excel in outputting a search engine friendly website, making updates was difficult and clumsy, there were almost no high quality community contributed modules (and they were not free), and developing custom functionliaty was expensive and complicated.

Drupal to the rescue!

So when we set out to udpate the site for the 2008-09 season, I felt it was time for a change and White Bird agreed. This new site rests on the Drupal platform, making for a more elegant, flexible, and feature rich site. Some of the improvements:

• Search engine optimized pages and URLs
• Lightweight, standards compliant markup
• Structured content so that performances can have fields such as videos, images galleries, companies, etc.
• A flexible calendar allowing us to publish event information in multiple formats, incuding RSS and iCal
• Image galleries and embedded videos
• Threaded discussions about individual performances
• A scalable platform to handle the increased traffic that we're sure is to come
• The ability to leverage the thousands of community contributed Drupal modules. We are already benefiting from webform, date, mediafield, cck, views, and several others.
• Built in search engine

In my clearly biased opinion, Drupal, and this new website, are a major improvement which will serve White Bird for years to come and help them a further their mission:

bringing the the best Portland-based, regional, national, and international dance companies to Portland, Oregon and to fostering the growth of dance in the region

Thank to the talented Annette Sabo for her design work and the hard work that Chad Greenwood and Christopher Roesing from White Bird put in to make it happen.