Current status of the project

This custom solution is now in production for more than a year and has been online for testing in various versions for more than a year and a half, during this time the CMS has grown from a few tens of pages to a few hunderts and more than a thousand now. There are now several new instances in pre-preproduction or design phases.

The result of our efforts and of the partenership with Alcidian Solutions is a flexible J2EE CMS solution tunned for the small segment of european (french) cityhalls. The result is a solution with responds to specific demands such as WAI content, content stagging and specific validation, standard compatible but graphical appealing content, etc.

Short description

As our client Alcidian Solutions requested from us, early in 2004 a custom CMS solution specially tuned for administrative institutions and cityhalls we started developing a custom CMS product. The main goals of the solutions where:

• Must provide WAI support. This was the most important requirement. As such the site must provide 2 separate templates: a WAI template and a non-wai template.
  
• Must provide stagging and validation mechanisms
• Must allow role separation per user and per page  (and page subtree)
  
• Must provide easy administration and maintenance. All content management must be available to the final users with basic computer knowledge
• Must allow for multi-language content

The application

The application features multiple site templates:

A full graphic template

• graphic elements
• custom menus
• various site portlets (contact, news, fast links, cityhall, "ephemerides", etc.)
  

A WAI template

• accesibility elements such as improved contrast, changeable font size
• completly table less
• completly linearizable
• contains all the content elements from the main template
  

The administration interface

• site tree configuration
  
• acces to configurable template elements
• users, roles and tokens (using the Nemesis IT NitUX module)
  
• various options

The site tree configuration

Each site contains a number of pages which can be easy configured in a tree. Each page can be configured in various ways, translated, moved and special attributes can be set. Validation and preview mechanisms are included. Content is staged and appear on the site only after validation by an authorized user.

Page editing

Each page contains a number of paragraphs of different types:

• text paragraph (edited using FCKEditor)
  
• photo album
• tables
• plain html
• special lists
• other custom components which can be added on the fly

Special page content templates allow for various paragraphs to be restricted, pre-defined or pre-created.

Paragraph editing

Each paragraph can be edited using it's special editing mechanism provided.

Template components

Template components can also be edited in order to allow the client to fully customize the template elements

Security options

The product allows for discreet roles definition based on tokens associated to each page and special action in the site. Then the roles can be assigned to users for access. The tokens allowed for a page include:

• edit content
• validate content
• delete content
• add/delete paragraph

And much more...

The CMS allows much more customization and editing of the content such as:

• news and other portlets configuration
• various site options
• even Saints data import for the ephemerides portlet