EE in the Wild: Mithun

Seattle-based architecture firm Mithun has recently launched a new website running ExpressionEngine. The site was built by the talented crew at Blue Flavor. Web Developer Kenny Meyers filled me in on the details of the project. Mithun “focuses on building sustainable and wonderful buildings. A very talented group of people that wanted to move architecture away from flash-based sites and onto content-filled, information-sharing standards site.” The site features a lot of the projects that Mithun works on, including the very cool Project Green.

Here’s what Kenny says about the site:

The site is a special combination of jQuery, ExpressionEngine and tons of media. There were a couple interesting problems to solve with the site, in particular the media management would be quite complex. The site makes heavy use of Mark Huot’s wonderful file extension for uploading media per project. It was customized a little to allow limit to be a parameter. Otherwise is their very little custom code involved except for some control structures.

Another interesting problem, related to this, that ExpressionEngine helped solve was the slideshow metadata. On each project page there are different slideshows that automatically play. These are a combination of the jQuery cycle plugin and some custom slideshow code. They pull metadata from an XML file, generated by PHP and EE templating language, as there is currently no great way to handle this without creating multiple sections.

The Solspace tags module is used in the site for content metadata. This is used along with some PHP to generate the tagging visual data on the projects page: http://www.mithun.com/projects/. Each project and knowledge article has tagging and some have two category groups attached to them. I hit a wall a couple times trying to solve display problems with EE and categories but eventually round the right conditional control structure that was needed.

Mithun has an iPhone site (not a mobile one, just iPhone) so that Mithun architects could quickly show off their work. It’s built using an ee template group that sits by itself at http://www.mithun.com/mobile. The site allows you to browse all the materials and projects on the main site.

The site was designed by Tom Watson, who had to deal with a giant company review board at Mithun; a company of architects who have opinions about design (which you can read on their site). The focus was on all the beautiful imagery and media and Tom did a great job of creating something usable and beautiful to wrap around their great content.