Create Your Own Theme

Make Festology your own with your own themes!

What are Festology themes?

Festology Themes allow you to match the event-management features of Festology with a web design that reflects your specific style or business needs. If you’ve made themes for Tumblr or WordPress, Festology themes should be really easy for you. If you’ve never made a theme before, don’t worry! It’s easy to pick up and we’ve prepared a lot of help to get you started quickly.

Sample sites made from Festology themes

Rooftop Films
Festology Demo
Mobile Demo

What do I need to know before I start designing a Festology theme?

Festology is a powerful content management system for events. Like WordPress, Tumblr, or other blogs, Festology has the equivalent of “posts” and “pages.” But what makes Festology different is the depth of specialized information baked into it for events, such as venues, participants, sponsors, performers and shows. There’s more detail about this specialized information a little later.

The Minimal Theme

For a minimal theme (i.e., the least amount of work you’ll need to do to make a functional Festology theme), you’ll need to make three pages to create a working Festology theme:

1. Homepage: Use the homepage to highlight your upcoming events, big-name speakers, or whatever you like!
2. List Page: List pages provide an overview of all the items of a certain type (events, venues, panelists, bands, etc.). The list might be long or it might be short. If the items have been put in categories, users can filter the lists by categories too. You might want your panelists to have photos, and you might want your events to be in a calendar, but you can keep things simple and make all the lists look the same regardless of what type of item it’s representing.
3. Item Page: Every event, participant and venue can have its own page, but they share enough in common that you can cheat and make one template for them all.

The Complete Theme

For a more complete theme, you can add pages to your minimal set of pages.  Any missing page will default to the generic item or list page. If there’s no specific page and no generic page, then the user will get a 404 page.  Here’s the complete list of pages with some suggestions of what you can do with them.  A complete list of elements available on each page follows the list.

1. Homepage
2. List
3. Item
   
4. 404 Page: Duplicate features from the homepage and direct people to more help for finding the page they thought they were finding.
5. Events (defaults to List): You might opt to make this into a calendar page
6. Event (defaults to Item): Include links for tickets, venue information and a map, short bios for all the panelists for this session, a check-in button for Foursquare…
7. Venues (defaults to List): Show all the venues on a single map using Google Maps.
8. Venue (defaults to Item): Include a map and directions.
9. Works (defaults to List): (Example: films or plays.)  Show a preview of the works via a YouTube video.
10. Work (defaults to Item): This is the page for films, plays, presentations and other art works. Embed a trailer or preview, or link to tickets for all the screenings of this film at your festival.
11. Performers (defaults to List): (Example: bands, comedians.) Include an audio player for a quick preview for each performer.
12. Performer (defaults to Item): This is the page for musicians, improv troupes and other performers. Include a large image or an embedded preview video from a site like YouTube or Vimeo.
13. Sponsors (defaults to List): Arrange the sponsors into tiers created by the event organizer.
14. Sponsor (defaults to Item): Link to the social media presences of your sponsor.
15. Participants (defaults to List): Show the participants head shots and link to relevant panels.
16. Participant (defaults to Item): Include a headshot, complete bio and a Twitter feed for the participant.
17. Pages (defaults to List): Show a hierarchical overview of all the info pages.
18. Page (defaults to Item): Because pages are hierarchical, you can link to subpages.

Page-specific elements

For every page, Festology provides a title, permalink, excerpt, description, images (including captions and credits), and meta tag information (title, description, keywords).

Pages in Festology are connected, so… for example, you can include as much information about a venue as you want when you’re on an event page that is taking place at that venue.  Or, if you have a film playing at a screening, that screening page will know everything about the film.  It’s up to you to decide if displaying the title and director is enough, or whether you want to include the film synopsis.

Additional information is available specific to each page:

Homepage: The homepage knows about all of the events, venues, participants, works, performers and sponsors for the series.

Event: Basic info (title, permalink, image, caption, credit), Descriptions (description, excerpt), Warnings (short, long), event type and categories, Venue (including specific location at the venue for this event), schedule (start/end time/date, show details (a series of time/info pairs), additional show details that don’t fit nicely in a time/info pair), Participants (and their role in this particular event (e.g., moderator, panelist, director)), Works, Performers, Ticketing (link to ticketing page, ticket costs, sold out, event ended, including potential buttons for “Get Tickets”, “Register”, “RSVP”, “Free Tickets” or “No Ticket Required”), Event Sponsors, embedded media (From YouTube, Vimeo, etc.).

Work: Basic info (title, permalink, image, caption, credit), Descriptions (description, excerpt), Warnings (short, long), work type and categories, Events for this work (all the information contained within the event, such as tickets and venue info), director, name and roles of cast/crew, location, duration, year of release, color or b/w, format, language, ID (like an IMDb ID), contact info, embedded media (From YouTube, Vimeo, etc.), links.

Performer: Basic info (title, permalink, image, caption, credit), Descriptions (description, excerpt), Warnings (short, long), style and categories, Events for this performer (all the information contained within the event, such as tickets and venue info), members, location, contact info, embedded media (From YouTube, Vimeo, etc.), links.

Participant: Basic info (name, permalink, image, caption, credit), bio, excerpt, affiliation, categories, Events for this participant (all the information contained within the event, such as tickets and venue info), contact info, links.

Venue: Basic info (name, opermalink, image, caption, credit), Descriptions (description, excerpt), categories, Events for this venue (all the information contained within the event, such as tickets and venue info), location details (specific location at the venue, address, neighborhood, borough/county, city), contact info, links.

Sponsor: Basic info (name, permalink, image, credit), description, official link.

Info Page: Page name, content, excerpt, subpages (and all the information containing within the subpage), categories.

Complete List of Tags

Coming soon…

More Design Tips

• Designing for Content Management Systems [Smashing Magazine]
• Design for CMS-powered web sites: How to design for dynamic content management systems [Ryan Cramer Design]
• Site Design and Layout [Wordpress Codex]

Related posts:

1. Getting the Most out of the BoCoCa2011 Theme