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Early in 2016, Six Feet Up was tapped for assistance by a multinational financial data and software company that needed help launching several new Plone sites.

The new themes were based on a series of innovative design comps with modern elements, such as editable infographics, responsive slideshows, collapsible menus, an Instagram feed, an ubiquitous roll-up navigation, embedded videos, and programmatically placed panel portlets. One of the many UI improvements included a dynamic mega menu, which is great for large sites that have a considerable number of pages for users to navigate. Rolling over the main navigation elements prompts a list of secondary options formatted differently depending on whether a third level of options is available or not. To achieve this, we modified the templates and the javascript of webcouturier.dropdownmenu.

The homepage also features two sets of rotating cards acting as mini teasers to blog posts and articles contained on the site. The cards were implemented using owlcarousel, a touch-enabled jQuery plugin that lets you create beautiful responsive carousel slider. Handily, Owlcarousel came with the functionality to swipe through these cards on mobile devices.

Once the main site was complete, Six Feet Up rolled out a major subsite using Lineage, the multisite management tool for Plone. Lineage made it simple to set up the subsite and gave the subsite its own look and navigation system.

The sites also feature a responsive design. On mobile devices, the first level of navigation is accessible through the hamburger menu. From there, tapping a menu option prompts the display of secondary options, and even tertiary options, while still offering a quick way to navigate back up one level. Once open, the hamburger menu turns into an "X" so users can easily exit it if they need to. Additionally, the text in the various carousel elements automatically scales down to accommodate smaller screen sizes.

In parallel to the theming work, a major refactor effort took place to facilitate maintenance and streamline future upgrades: the Six Feet Up engineers cleaned up old code, eliminated unused content types, removed template overrides that were no longer needed, reduced the backend complexity and set forth best practices.

Overall, the success of this project is directly linked to the close collaboration between the two companies and the speed and quality of the communication, facilitated by Slack-based real-time exchanges between the two technical teams.

To see more of our work, please review our portfolio.