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Burn FM

A picture of INSA Lyon's campus
A picture of The University of Birmingham's campus

Burn FM is the University of Birmingham's student radio station. I joined Burn FM in my first year at university and have helped host 2 shows.

Initially rebuilding burnfm.com

At the start of my second year, I took interest in the website they currently were using. It was an old WordPress site, which seemingly hadn't been updated in several years, however much of the now-broken content was still online.

I decided to take on the challenge of rebuilding the website from scratch. I wanted to create a modern and responsive website with the end goal of it being completely integrated with our other technologies, as well as easy to maintain and update.

Technologies

We initially used Broadcast Radio to manage our shows for the first two years that I was at Burn FM. It provided the system where we'd define our schedules and the radio shows currently running.

With a strong background in React, I chose it as the UI library. Next.js was my framework of choice for its robust, scalable environment and advanced front-end features.

We use StackCP to manage the web server, so a static export of the Next.js app worked well.

Migrating from Broadcast Radio to a custom CMS - Burn Admin Panel

Once the website was fully integrated with Broadcast Radio's system, me and Bradley (the other person working on tech at Burn FM) looked for further ways to integrate the systems together.

As we were paying for UK2's Shared Hosting, we already had access to the services required to replicate the functionality we required from Broadcast Radio. By implementing it ourselves, we would have more control over features, and unify more of the technologies we used.

Architecture

This new system would replicate the features that we used from Broadcast Radio, allowing for:

  • Radio Shows
  • Weekly Schedules consisting of Radio Shows

As well as adding new features for our specific use-case:

  • A description and photo attached to each Radio Show
  • Podcasts
  • Posting messages on the website
  • An off-air mode to handle unexpected change of schedule
  • A default show to fill in gaps within the schedule

New features to burnfm.com

This new architecture allows enhanced control and organisation of shows, allowing for the following new features:

  • A catalogue of all shows past and present
  • Shows being able to occur multiple times in one schedule
  • Shows remembering all previous show-times

With the following planned development:

  • Managing and displaying podcasts on the website
  • Managing and displaying posts on the website