Communion has roots as a London club-night founded by Ben Lovett (Mumford and Sons), Kevin Jones (Cherbourg) and producer Ian Grimble.

The website was designed by Franz Jeitz of Fudgegraphics, who has worked on the Communion brand identity for well over a year.

My task was to convert the Photoshop design into a working WordPress theme. Once the design was in place I enhanced the site with a custom plugin to display the event flyers. The live page and next shows widget are controlled by a php script that ensures the flyers are automatically displayed as upcoming or past shows.

The label’s mailing list is managed through phplist and an iframe widget to allow signups without leaving the current page.

To promote the release of “Communion”, a compilation of nu-folk talent, I integrated a streaming flash player to be placed on the artists page. The mp3 player is modelled on the album artwork rather than using a generic flash player.

The first release from Communion Records is a compilation featuring indie-folk’s finest new talent. The initial release strategy meant that each vinyl copy of ‘Communion’ would include a unique code providing access to a free digital copy of the album. I developed a download system to check a user’s code and ensure that it expires after each song is downloaded. The urls of the files are also protected so that the songs can only be downloaded with an access code. I built the system using PHP and MySQL to function within the existing WordPress site.
The label decided on a different delivery route for the album so unfortunately this system never made it into the public domain.