The Alliance for the Arts (AFTA) Cultural Database project combined two great loves of Funny Garbage: New York City and the arts. At a high level, this massive, multi-year project consisted of: the development of three public-facing web sites designed to promote cultural events around the five boroughs; the creation of a robust Administrative Tool that enables the cultural organizations to add information to the sites themselves, while proving AFTA with the controls for editorial oversight; and an update of AFTA’s Arts Research Center which collects a wide variety of data sources into a single database, from which AFTA can produce sophisticated reports on demand.

FG also created the NYC ARTS Map, which is specifically geared to the unique features of New York’s cultural geography. Based on Google’s map API, FG customized its design to match the web sites, and enhanced its functionality to meet the needs of AFTA’s audiences. FG architected and designed the NYC ARTS Calendar, a custom-built, filtered calendar system that is both browse-able and searchable. The elegantly designed front-end system of web sites is masked by an equally elegant and robust content management system (CMS), the NYC ARTS Content Manager, a custom solution built on the Symfony PHP framework. FG worked closely with AFTA while planning the CMS to ensure that it not only met their stringent requirements for data entry, but also improve the methods by which they would manage the volume of content being added to the system every day.

Through the combination of AFTA’s partnership with the city’s cultural organizations and FG’s innovative vision, the NYC ARTS sites provide the most accurate, up-to-date and relevant information concerning cultural organizations and events in New York City.