Marketplace

Palantir worked closely with APM’s in-house technical resources and design team to develop the new site. Much of the work done for the site was contributed back to the Drupal community.

One significant contribution made possible by Palantir’s work with APM was improvements to Drupal’s Media module, which provides an extensible framework for managing both local and remotely-hosted files and multimedia assets. Palantir hosted a Media development sprint at its Chicago offices, bringing together developers from across the Drupal community to create a stable release of the module and develop a roadmap for new features that would help improve its usability.

Because many of Marketplace’s audio files are stored in a remote system, Drupal needed a way to easily access them. This was accomplished through the development of the Remote Stream Wrapper module, which enables Drupal’s Media module to use externally-hosted files in the same way that local files are.

To enable Marketplace staff to easily create dynamic slideshows, Palantir developed tools that enable slideshows to be treated as a discrete content within Drupal. This not only makes it easier for content editors and contributors to create slideshows, but also offers additional flexibility in terms of layout; slideshows can now be reused and inserted in different places throughout the site in two or three column formats. Slideshows can be dynamically created based on topics and categories, or curated from a series of stories hand-picked by administrative users.

In order to achieve the front-end look-and-feel created by Marketplace’s in-house design team, Palantir utilized Drupal’s Zen theme framework, leveraging the power of CSS3 and Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets (Sass) to develop a flexible Drupal theme that worked seamlessly with a variety of different layouts. As a result of the project, several improvements were made to improve Zen’s support for Sass.