Case study of a custom J2EE CMS for french cityhalls websites
Current status of the project
This custom solution is now in production for more than 6 years. During this time the CMS has grown from a few tens of pages to more than a thousand now.
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 which responds to specific demands such as WAI content, content staging and specific validation, standard compatible but appealing graphical content, etc.
Short description
As our client, Alcidian Solutions requested in 2004 a custom CMS solution especially tuned for administrative institutions and cityhalls. We started developing a custom CMS product. The main goals regarding the final solutions were:
- 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 staging 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 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
