Climate One brings people together for conversations about climate change, and its website holds a large archive of those conversations. When the team came to us, they had one requirement that shaped everything else: a visitor should be able to start an episode and keep exploring the site while they listen.
That requirement led to a rebuild of the website, together with a visual refresh and a migration from Drupal 7. InkëDesign led the UX and visual design, and FivePaths implemented it in Drupal.
Proving the player first
Ordinary page navigation replaces the whole browser document, including any audio player on the page. A player can stay visible at the bottom of the screen and still stop the moment someone follows a link.
Before committing to the platform, we built a working prototype to confirm Drupal could support uninterrupted listening. The implementation keeps the player in place while it loads and replaces the content around it, and it updates the page title and browser history, so every page a visitor reaches still has an address they can return to or share. Once that worked, keeping Drupal was a clear decision: it already suited Climate One's content and relationships.
The player works with a playlist. Visitors can queue episodes, change their order and open an episode's page from the queue, so listening and browsing share one place in the interface.
Migrating while building
Content from the old site had to be imported repeatedly while the new site took shape, and the new build added fields, such as Episode Highlights, that the old site never had. Rolling back and rerunning a migration could have wiped that new work. We added migration handling that protects those fields through each rollback and reimport, and separated identifiers for new content from imported records.
Connecting the archive
Episodes connect to guests, events, topics and related recordings. Related episodes are ranked by shared guests, tags and categories, tuned to the team's expectations, and editors can include or exclude individual episodes. Search and filtering give visitors another way in, all while their queue keeps playing.
The details on a phone
Near launch we worked through spacing, headings, alignment and the mobile playlist with the designers. One issue mattered more than it looks: dragging to reorder the queue competed with scrolling it. Confining reordering to a dedicated drag handle gave each action its own touch target, and the queue stays usable on a phone.
We continue to maintain the site and support the Climate One team as their needs grow.