Sainsbury's - Living Archive
How I built a living archive for Sainsbury’s.
About
Using a wealth of content from their archives, Sainsbury’s asked Beyond to create a fully immersive digital experience to tell the story of their heritage and bolster their vision: To be the most trusted retailer, where people love to work and shop.
Build
The backend is built with Python, and django CMS, hosted on Google App Engine. The pages are rendered using Jinja templates and the front end uses SCSS and JS.
Role
- Lead Backend Developer
- Provided estimates, scoping and technical oversight
Challenges
A backend challenge was to find a CMS solution that would allow creating articles in a way that allowed the CMS editor to use any block of content on any order.
- After researching existing options, I have decided to use django CMS since it allowed to add third-party content blocks, and allowed to add it on any order.
- Articles and collections required different images to be featured in different locations. I had to extend and build in django-cms a custom admin UI that allowed content editors to select the focal points for each image, and aspect ratio.
Learnings
Based on my experience in using django-cms, here are my learnings.
- The django-cms UI was based on Django admin interface, which was very blocky and a bit ugly. Hence the django-cms UI was clunky and not so easy to use.
- Managing a large number of pages in django-cms from the UI was slow and sometimes would break the Materialized Path Tree (see django-mptt).
Results
- Continued to grow throughout 2014, celebrating Sainsbury’s 145th anniversary.
- Since launch, the site has added interactive stories, graphs, and enhanced content management capabilities.
Media
