Zimma Web Development

It’s been a long time in the making but it’s finally all there. That is the all new Shambala Festival 2009 Website.

To quote the website, here’s a bit of background about Shambala Festival:

We see Shambala as a creative, non-commercial, ethical and family-friendly festival with a wild side. We have endeavoured to cultivate  a down-to-earth mix of creativity, the unexpected, a warm & friendly atmosphere, and quality entertainment.

As well as building the site and integrating the Zimma CMS system here are some of the other features we have developed for this project:

The Flickr / Spry photo gallery

Over the years, Shambalians have added their photos to the Shambala flickr groups and this makes up the Shambala photo gallery. You can select a year, photographer or highlight and the relevant photos will be pulled in from flickr.

Some of the galleries contain hundreds of photos and to make this more manageable we’ve integrated the Spry Ajax framework. Using this we could paginate the gallery results, add some neat transitions between gallery pages but best of all, hold off loading the full set of images and load each page as it is viewed saving on bandwidth and load times. Click here to see it in action.

The Shambala Community Forum

In the upcoming weeks to the big weekend people are getting excited and where to better to let it all out than the forum. For this we customised a vanilla forum which has done the job perfectly and in particular, it’s the simplicity that lots of people like. Here’s a comment from the forum

Well the fact that I got this far suggests its working OK. Hate it when theres too many pages to work through to get onto a forum site. So thanks for simplicity. Mike M

Ticketing white label

For buying tickets, we used TheTicketSellers white label functionality we had already built. Clicking through to buy tickets seamlessly takes you to TheTicketSellers but you wouldn’t know it. See the ticket page here.

Carbon offset calculator

Winners of the “Most sustainable event of 2008″ and the “Outstanding Green Award” last year, the festival is very conscious of it’s carbon footprint. This year they have introduced a carbon offset calculator that Zimma built and integrated into the buying process. A customer only needs to enter their postcode and it calculates an estimated amount of CO2 based on  their distance form the festival. You can read more about how they are using the money here: http://shambalafestival.org/about-us/sustainability/#offsetting-your-travel-explained

Zimma have also developed a crew ticket management system for the festival in conjunction with TheTicketSellers. More on that to come soon…