Content Management Case Study

Date : 2005

IFG Profile

The International Focus Group is a partnership of countries, institutions and practitioners committed to the provision of sustainable transport access for the poor

IFG home page

The aims of the site are to:

• publish "information notes" detailing solutions to common engineering and policy problems affecting rural road engineering in developing countries.
• provide mechanism for engineers to contribute their own solutions applicable to their local environment
• provide multi-lingual content
• provide "micro-sites" dealing with particular themes

The main technical challenges of the site were to:

• provide a content management system to enable IFG staff to easily publish technical documents to the website
• provide a website framework that could handle multiple languages and easy creation of unlimited "micro-sites", each having their own tools to search, contribute and download technical documents

We built a tool to enable IFG staff to publish Information Notes to the website. As many of the Information Notes had a common paragraph structure (for example, Problem,Solution,Design,Maintenance) we were able to provide a facility to define each type of information note as a template. Creating a new Information Note would pre-populate a web form with the relevant paragraphs headings from the template.

The solution was flexible, in that IFG staff were able to define their own templates for different types of Information Notes.

Defining the paragraph structure for an Information Note type

Each information note can have its own library of related images

Using the HTML editor to edit an Information Note

A "micro-site" can be thought of as a themed site within the main site.

A themed micro-site

The IFG website administration system contains a "micro-site builder" that enables IFG staff to:

• define a micro-site
• set up navigation bars that can link to content pages or pre-defined site components eg. "search", "shopping basket"
• add web-pages, events, documents, Information Notes and news items to the micro-site
• set up content categories relevant to the theme

Setting up categories

Setting up multi-lingual labels

The Translations Store is a repository for translations of the content and labels used by the website. This provides an easy to use interface enabling staff to quickly add and modify translated elements.