Open Source software was at the heart of multimedia coverage of this year's National Arts Festival in Grahamstown. The Cue Online website is powered by Drupal, while CuePix is running a vanilla installation of Menalto's Gallery2. Cue is the official festival newspaper.

The real success story is Cue Online though which, thanks to Drupal, was up and running in just three weeks. The news site takes a multifaceted approach to covering the arts festival to allow users to experience the event in a new and novel way, giving students in-depth experience of a production news room.

Content on the website is licensed under a Attribution-ShareAlike-NonCommercial Creative Commons licence. Cue online content is derived from Cue Newspaper, which is in its 20th year of production.

"We are also aggregating content from CueTV, CueRadio, and images from CuePix for the website," says Bradley Whittington, lecturer in the New Media Lab in the Rhodes University School of Journalism and Media Studies.

"But the best part is that all of this is powered by open source software, with Drupal powering the Cue website, hosted on an Ubuntu Linux server, with data storage in MySQL. We even have a snippet of python code to parse the weather," says Whittington.

Running parallel to the Cue Online project were a team of journalists from the Highway Africa News Agency and the University of Utrecht. Whittington developed the site in a period of three weeks, including a survey of appropriate Drupal modules, and development of the front end theme.

"The entire site has been built using a standard installation of Drupal with no major modifications to any of the additional modules, and no custom modules have been written, it is simply a mixture of the right modules" Whittington says he was impressed by the "power and flexibility" of Drupal. He confesses that he "did have to make some minor changes to some of the modules, for example, to add integration with local tools like Muti. It was trivially simple to provide space for podcasts, video, and images as well as PDFs of the print edition, which link to articles that have been repurposed for the website."

The website now acts as an archival resource for print editions of the Cue newspaper. Brian Garman, head of the Cue project for 2007, says that "when people ask for re-prints of the Cue newspaper I am just going to tell them to head over to the print section of Cue online".

The online guide is a handy user-friendly feature. All production names in news stories and reviews click through to this interactive guide, which lists all-important details such as show times, venue, duration and ticket prices. The related short-review also appears, giving visitors a unique snapshot of a performance or exhibition. Visitors to Cue Online can add comments and star ratings to almost everything in the system, including shows and venues.

"I think we ultimately provided the most comprehensive coverage of festival," says Jude Mathurine, head of the New Media Lab. "We are hosting our video on myvideo, which not only lowers the complexity and load of the site, but provides some serious link-love."

"Because the development and management of the site has been so easy we have been contemplating running Cue online as an ongoing teaching and learning vehicle that provides a place for outputs from student journalists in the Art and Theatre space," says Whittington.

"It really was a breeze to get up and get moving on media production."