The WGBH.org Development Blog

Filed by Phil at 11:32 am under Drupal, Television, TV Guide, Images, Flickr

Feels like we’re already well into summer mode, here at WGBH Online. The temperature is heating up, people are starting to take long vacations (welcome back from Hawaii, Pete!) and - the surest sign that summer is almost upon us - I’m in full blown shorts-wearing mode.

But don’t think the work on the WGBH.org rebuild has slowed at all. Oh no. My fingers are already sore from all the coding going on and we’re getting near the home stretch of the first phase of our rebuild.

Before I give the latest update, note the newest feature on the site over there to the right - a Flickr badge! Based on the recommendation of my friend - and a friend of WGBH - Steve Garfield, I’ve created a Flickr account to go along with this blog. After all, when you think web site development you think photos! Tell your friends!

Anyways, back to the rebuild of WGBH.org, I’ve been busy building our our episode page, which is fairly complex but is coming along nicely. So for those keeping track, once that’s complete we’ll have built a Programs A-Z page, Schedule Grid, Full Day by Channel schedules and now the episode page. That’ll really just leave a search page to be built and then we can prepare to test and launch!

Wait, but what about the series page, you say?

An excellent question, class. Somebody’s been paying attention!

Well, that’s no longer a concern since we recently decided to do away with building our own series pages. How about them apples?

In case it’s not clear what we’re talking about, a series page would, for example, be a page dedicated to an episodic program, such as Nova, Frontline, Masterpiece, etc. Such a page could have a description of the series, a list of upcoming episodes, other related series, etc. An episode page, on the other hand, would be dedicated to, well, a specific episode of a series.

We currently do publish series pages on WGBH.org, however most people never see them, as we generally try to direct people to the next upcoming episode of a series. But they are there and we do curate them. However, after initially planning to build them and support them in the new world, we decided to no longer produce them.

There were basically three reasons to forgo series pages:

(1) Series descriptions do not come through the PBS/TV Guide data feeds. The data contain episodic descriptions, but not descriptions for a series. So, if we want to publish series pages we’d have to enter these descriptions ourselves, which defeats one of the main purposes why we’re going to this new data feed in the first place.

(2) The episodic/non-episodic issue. Obviously, some programs are non-episodic, meaning they are not series. Since the schedule data that we’ll be getting does not explicitly distinguish between episodic and non-episodic programs, all programs coming into the system will be treated the same way and have at least one episode. In this case, non-episodic series in our system will just be a series with one episode. In this case, it wasn’t going to be trivial to deal with this issue. For example, for non-episodic programs, what page do we send users to? The series page or the episode page? Clearly we would have to either manually flag non-episodic series as they came in or work up some convoluted logic to properly display the information for such shows. Neither option sounded good.

(3) Why even bother? Each show presumably already has it’s own web site anyways, so why should we reinvent the wheel? Episode pages at least provide airing information specific to our channels, plus we can use them for promotion of DVD’s and whatnot or cross-promotion of other shows, so we do want to have those pages. But a series page really wouldn’t be adding much value to anybody.

So, there you have it: we punted the whole idea. This was fine with me, as it makes development a bit easier. No complaints here.

Time to put some sunblock on my pasty legs.

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