Scott Barrett

I was responsible for all database design, back-end and front-end code and all flash on the site.

Developing for Francis Ford Coppola is like watching one of his movies. It starts off a bit slow and sets the field of characters. Then it moves into the second act and feelings and story begin to emerge and in the third act the story crescendos and then ends with all the lose ends tied up and you walk away feeling satisfied.

Front Page – The Flash Timeline

The front page was the most challenging aspect of the site and the piece most dear to Francis. His goal was to represent a time-line of the winery and his story with wine. He also didn’t want a simple and plain time line, he wanted something that had the feeling of an old school catalog, maybe an old Sears Robuck catalog or Whole Earth. Lastly he wanted some interaction and animations to bring it all to life.

I built a small modular framework for the timeline where each ‘module’ derives from a base class and each have a set of shared functionality. I also created modules that can be reused such as those that display single images, slide shows and flipping images. Along side those we also have custom modules built with specific pieces of code and functionality like the “swimmers wanted” module and the logo/news rotation module. With the framework and module structure I designed, modules can be created, reused and placed into the timeline with ease.

Back End and Content Management

To support the site, I built a robust Content Management System that meets the unique needs of this site and the company allowing content owners to edit their content without interaction of programmers and designers. 95% of the site content can be edited from within the CMS.

For our asset management, I created a web application called “Media Manager” which interfaces with Amazon S3 for external assets used on the site including most all images, videos and flash. Amazon S3 was chosen because of bandwidth issues and lack there of where the site is currently hosted (internal). To interface with S3, the ThreeSharp library was used.

The Wine Chooser

The Wine Chooser takes advantage of ajax calls to create an interactive question tree a user can go up and down based on answers to questions until they come to the final page where we recommend a wine for their needs.

Custom Blog and Search Engine

With the site being written in .NET, we decided to write a simple blog engine to run inside of the site for our News posts. The blog engine supports drafts and published items, tags, categories and is search-able using the Sphinx Search Engine which I implemented using a C# library wrapper.

The Rest of the Site

The rest of the site takes advantage of lightboxes, carousels, and some custom ajax calls to add some unique functionality and content views of the site.

Visit Francis Ford Coppola Winery »