The Art Council Collection site was a little bit different to the majority of builds Sakura Brae undertakes. Most builds either take existing content and build on top or there is no real existing content and there is largely a free reign on how the site is built, just as long as the content can be added in the simplest fashion possible.

All the artworks for the collections were managed in third party catalogue software, which provided an XML feed split over an unknown number of separate XML documents.

A custom Drupal cron task was built to pull each of the XML documents to a local directory, then go through each local XML file and compare the current Drupal content against the new XML content and adjust the Drupal content accordingly. Any images were also pulled to the Drupal managed file system. To minimise frontend performance hits, these updates were carried out at quite times and made use of the Batch API.

Users could create an account and save their favourite artworks to create their own collection.

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