06 Dec 2016

SES: Drupal 8, front-end teardown

We’ve just designed and built a new website for the world-leading satellite operator, SES. SES connects and enables broadcast, telecom, corporate and government customers, and enriches the lives of billions of people worldwide.

We’re really proud of how it’s turned out, and as it’s one of the first batch of high-profile large Drupal 8 websites, we’ve been asked by a wide range of people about our technical approach to building a complex site using the latest version of Drupal.

You can read our case study here on the project as a whole, but here is Stuart Wilson, Head of Frontend Development at Catch to explain a little more around our front-end approach:  

“The sheer scale of the SES website demanded a scalable and comprehensive front end system. As a team we approached the transition from design to code by creating a static style guide of individual components which would then be used to power the Drupal 8 website.

Our modular CSS was written in SASS using NPM to run build scripts and wrapping it up with PostCSS’ Autoprefixer for greater resilience to browser inconsistencies. Using BEM syntax and championing an OOCSS approach allowed us to write configurable componentry which was open to extension, but closed to core modification which meant that QA testing could happen earlier on in the build.

“The sheer scale of the SES website demanded a scalable and comprehensive front end system."

STUART WILSON, HEAD OF FRONT END DEVELOPMENT AT CATCH

Thanks to Drupal 8’s use of the Twig templating engine, we could test the flexibility of our HTML templates using mock data which was then swappable for real content from the CMS.  This created a unified theming workflow with clear ownership between the front and back end of the website and helped reduce code overhead whilst instilling scalability within the UI.

Thanks to our modular approach, we were able to utilise Drupal Paragraphs to promote greater flexibility across content types in the CMS, enabling SES to realise any combination of page designs they required.”

Visit www.ses.com and stay tuned for future SES developments. We’re continuing to work with the team in Luxembourg on increased website functionality and a range of other exciting digital products.

06 Jan 2016

Go wild with ZSL TV!

Did you unwrap a brand new Apple TV this holiday season? Need a superb app to install? Good news - it’s with great pleasure we announce the arrival of our first app for the new 4th Gen Apple TV + tvOS: ZSL TV! It’s a brilliant way to get all of the best new video content direct from Zoological Society London, direct from inside the fantastic London Zoo and Whipsnade Zoo, as well as their global conservation projects.

ZSL TV includes 6 featured collections; Zoo Babies, Meet the Animals, Fun Animal Facts, Curious Creatures, Conservation & Science and Behind the Scenes. Already available are the cream of the ZSL content archives with new exclusive content coming soon, now’s a great time to grab the app and install it! 

ZSL TV is available now on the Apple TV app store, just head to there on your shiny new Apple TV and search for ZSL and you’ll find it ready to download and bring great animal based videos direct to your living room. 

ZSL TV was designed and developed by the team at Catch, with great content provided by the super talented videographers at ZSL. Founded in 1826, the Zoological Society of London is an international scientific, conservation and educational charity whose mission is to promote and achieve the worldwide conservation of animals and their habitats. 

You can read more about our work with ZSL here, and visit zsl.org for more info about the amazing work done by ZSL in over 50 countries as well as at London Zoo and Whipsnade Zoo.

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