Offradio Online Radio Station - offradio.gr

By Netstudio on 6 March 2013

Offradio.gr, the leading professional online radio in Greece, had to be redesigned with the addition of some really important features: a blog, live playlist with connection to Last FM and other sites, the weekly schedule, producers info and an updated new player. The homepage features full-screen HTML5 video backgrounds and tons of Javascript!

Visit offradio.gr →

Why Drupal was chosen:

Streaming (feeding new content) is automated, playing in Drupal 7. The name of each track is scrobbled through a streaming setup tool (jazzler) to Netstudio.gr which imports all the data: Which artist, which track, slides, playlist, the works. And all a user has to do is click the ‘Listen Live’ button and have all the music and the info about it. Cool, huh?

The weekly schedule update is also automated. Without any html, an Offradio administrator can easily change the e-radio program, and say, for instance, that this producer is web-casting that show at that time.

Developing Offradio on Drupal guaranteed 100% WYSIWYG for its eclectic design.

Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome):

Turn the radio off. Turn on the music already!

Offradio.gr is radio in a post-fm/am era, a website about a world of music changing live. Based in Thessaloniki, Greece, it started webcasting in 2008. Nowadays it has listeners from 90 countries. In 2011 Offradio was honored with an e-award for best internet radio station in Greece. How come? Let’s see, or rather…

Listen to Offradio

“OFF” as in “Off Broadway”, as in experimental radio webcasting alternative music experience. Offradio works like an internet lightning conductor attracting all positive music energy and listeners from all over the globe.

Once you compare radio static sound to digital fidelity you come to appreciate net radio. Yet what makes Offradio.gr so special among hundreds or even thousands of internet radio stations you can get on your smartphone (iPhone ή Android) through 3G, 4G, WiFi, WMP, WINAMP or iTunes? In other words…

Why OFF On?

You tell us:

Because Offradio.gr is an INDEPENDENT web radio station, so its music choices are exclusively based on the interaction between its producers and listeners.
Soooo many choices when you tune in. You can:
Check out the track, producer and show

Log in and whisper stuff during the song or the show, and get to see your comment with your username in the open window right there and then, or…
Email the producers.
Say your thing on facebook or twitter…
Automatically connect to Last FM radio station.
If you happened to be in the bathroom… shaving when this awesome track played 10 minutes ago, you can always check out the playlist and listen to it or download it.
Take a look at today’s program.
Travel back and listen to or download one of the special Offradio shows of a previous day.
For your Offradio blog choices
Its cool HTML5 video headers (especially the antenna-drinking straw or the serving style of whatever it is you’re drinking) or, cutting to the chase…
Offradio design (and all the am/pm night lurking inside)
All your streetlife options on Offradio blog…

Offradio administrators, you poor things! How can you ever manage all that streaming?

Good question, indeed. How can Offradio people be full-time radio producers and administrators of such an interactive website at the same time? We wouldn’t go so far as to call them ‘poor things’, though. Smart, yes. We’re talking about people who were born to broadcast eclectic music here. What they did was assign all the e-radio automation to Netstudio so they could focus on what they do best: webcasting.

Technical specifications

Key modules/theme/distribution used:

Better Exposed Filters

Views Infinite Scroll

Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen:

Feeds
For the execution of Feeds importers within the cron file, feeds_source() was used that returns the importer's object where we can execute the import:

$importer_id = 'artists_importer';
$source = feeds_source($importer_id);
$source->import();

HTML5 Media
Maybe on of the most impressive elements of the site is the frontpage html5 slideshow. For this we have used HTML5 video module. Because of the browsers incompatibilities, each video is in two formats. We have an mp4 and an ogv/webm. In case of a browser being incapable of played either of these, a screenshot is taking it's place.

Views Infinite Scroll
We had to hack a little bit this great module because we wanted the scrolling to be enabled on clicking and we wanted positions 5 and 8 to be replaced always with ads. For the second part of our goal we 've also used hook_views_pre_render().

All the links and buttons have JavaScript effects except the site's logo! We have also used theme_button(), theme_field(), theme_menu_link(), theme_form_element() for all the link effects.

Week's schedule
For the development of the week's schedule we used taxonomy terms and editable fields module. The choice was made for the changing of each time slot, the entity reference module for the connection between nodes and taxonomy terms and the Views Field View that was needed for the view's show inside views as fields.

Organizations involved:

Team members: