Community portal for Government organisation
The Client mission is to provide quality living environment and a high standard of public health, protected against the spread of communicable diseases. Having performed well and achieved a clean and green living environment, the Client aims to move from maintaining good environmental performance in the short term to achieving environmental sustainability in the long term. One of the process is to build awareness among the youths regarding the environment. To achieve this, the Client would like to develop a enviromental portal tagetting at the youths. The portal will provide youths with news and articles relating to the environment, venue to discuss about the environment, download photos on the environment for their school presentation and much more.
The main challenges of the content management system were to introduce extensive functionalities as far as possible as the system was to be deployed on the shared web hosting environment at HITS, a government shared hosting environment. The result was a content management system that works within the limits of the HITS hosting environment and which provides important functions to support website templating and maintenance, updating of content, approval workflow and notifications.
The core features of the content management (evolutionCMS) consist of the Site Manager, Template Manager, Component Manager and User Manager. The Site Manager provides basic functionalities for addition, editing and deletion of web sections and pages in the site map. Administrators are able to arrange the site structure as desired, which will then be reflected automatically in the site map and navigational menus. The Template Manager and Component Manager work hand-in-hand to provide dynamic and extensive functionalities for administrators to set up the look-and-feel of the website via use of templates and reuse components across different sections and pages of the website. The use of templates and components allows administrators to easily place dynamic content on the web pages, such as navigational menus and calendars. The User Manager provides the core functions to allow management of users and their access rights within the system, which has direct correlation to the general approval workflow in the CMS.
The CMS is built on a highly modular concept. This allows the base system to be extended to provide even more modules. Such modules that have been developed and implemented are Forum Manager, Blog Manager, Online Form Creator, Document Library Manager, Image Library Manager and Articles Manager. Each of the modules is dedicated to managing a certain type of content. This allows a myriad of content type to be maintainable by the administrators themselves, thus introducing dynamic and “fun” content to the website without needing high expertise know-how on the administrators’ parts.
The approval workflow of the CMS guides the content through the predefined flow from Updater to Approver prior to publication on the website. As the portal is envisioned to be maintainable by not only the internal team, but also external organizations and individuals, the approval workflow was to accommodate the special arrangement in such a way that different sections of the website can be assigned to different user groups who will administer and manage the sections. This opens up the possibility for the entire website to be maintainable by a diverse group of users, thereby streamlining the content updating process and efforts, and still maintaining the approval process that becomes even more important in this scenario.
- Website:
- www.youthhabitat.sg
- Screenshots:
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