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http://www.bmi.com

BMI represents more than 475,000 songwriters, composers and music publishers. They collect license fees and distribute them as royalties to those members whose works have been performed.

David Bills and his team build BMI.com in-house, but they hired me as lead designer and for ExpressionEngine development. I was part of the team that built BMI’s first ExpressionEngine-powered site in 2005, and I have been working in various roles for the company for over 13 years. This has allowed me to work on several complete site redesigns and the development of new features and sections on an ongoing basis.

BMI’s site serves many functions. Songwriters can join BMI online, and existing members have online access to manage their account, get discounts and career advice. Businesses can obtain a license to play BMI music and search the BMI catalog of more than 6.5 million musical works. There is also extensive content for music fans, including artist features and video clips from BMI events.

The ExpressionEngine setup of BMI.com is complex, with over 40 weblogs, 80 add-ons, 6,000 categories, 20,000 entries and a great deal of custom development.

With so many add-ons at work, I’ll highlight just a few here. A customized version of the ImageSizer plugin is used throughout the news, features and photo galleries to handle generating thumbnails from full screen images. The User module is used to maintain a completely separate environment for the BMI media relations team, who manage the Press section of the site. We recently set up a system using Matrix and Playa to easily build pages for special events such as South by Southwest, highlighting news, photos, videos and other content from various weblogs. We also redesigned BMI’s email newsletters and set up Champagne to deliver them directly through ExpressionEngine. Custom modules perform functions such as event registration and provide tools for site administrators to manage content outside of the control panel.

We have designed and developed systems to manage the large archive of media on the site. This includes a video section browsable by songwriter, composer or event name. We developed a photo system for the site, using weblog entries for each image, that allow for easy creation of galleries by keyword or category. In addition to this use, categories are used extensively on BMI.com to automatically build thousands of roster pages for BMI songwriters and sections focused on music genres, locations and events.

Other Add-ons

Champagne
Diggie
Photo Gallery Extended

Company: Eric Miller Design

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