Modern Theatre in Context is a multimedia chronology of Canadian and Western European drama.
The principal chronology entries are organized along two timelines: Canadian drama, and Western European drama. Supplementary entries provide information about key playwrights, venues, and dramatic genres.
Each timeline has a dedicated colour palette and dated content entries have associated images and display supplementary content links and contextual cultural information to users.
The chronology timeline navigator bars and sidebar decade thumbnail display are dynamically generated based on the active decade and dated content entries that have been approved and then published to the live timeline through the custom content management system.
Expanded news listing pages cover 5-year spans for the chronology's full date range, providing broader cultural, social, political, and technological contexts for the material covered in Modern Theatre in Context.
Expanded news detail pages allow users to navigate forward or backward in time, and to access the other expanded news entries associated with the currently active 5-year span.
Advanced search functionality supplements plaintext search, enabling users to focus on defined keyword metadata, a specific date range, and isolate results for one or both chronologies.
The results listing page is designed to support research activity by allowing the user to refine searches and save up to 5 sets of results to the sidebar for the duration of the active session.
The custom content management system controls the authoring and publishing process, assigning authoring, approval, and publishing capabilities to distinct categories of users.
One-touch publishing functionality seamlessly transfers assets from the staging server to the live server environment with no manual file transfer requirements.
The content authoring process supports provisional inline linking of key terms for subsequent association of supplementary content entries, such as playwright bios.
On page load, the application checks for all active content and renders the HTML accordingly, displaying only active links to end users and parsing out all others.
To avoid the duplication of key terms by different content authors, the input process prompts editors to search for and select a given keyword and attach it.
Maintenance scripts allow administrators to regularly identify orphaned terms and remove or reattach them, thus simplifying an important but technical data hygiene process.
