Flying I Ranch

The Portland Oregon Visitors Association - 2001 / 2002

www.pova.com

Content Management System implemented with Zope
Customization of Zope for a non-technical user base and to extend staging capabilities
Server Technology Consultation and advisory responsibility
Technical Project Management and direct supervision of contract developer resources
Dynamic tool design and implementation in PHP
Design compositions
Creation of style guide and page design standards
html and Graphics production
Live delivery / launch management

The Portland Oregon Visitors Association (POVA) is a private non-profit destination marketing organization whose mission is to strengthen the region's economy by marketing the Portland metropolitan area as a preferred destination for meetings, conventions and leisure travel.

In July of 2001, POVA, through their advertising and publics relations firm, Young and Roehr Group, invited Flying I Ranch to participate in the full redesign and reimplementation of the www.pova.com website. This invitation was extended due to the heavily technical nature of the proposed reimplementation and Young and Roehr's relative inexperience with engineering projects. Over the course of the project, Flying I Ranch provided a depth of other services as well, including direct engineering and programming work, systems consultation, site production and more.

The goals of the project were:

A complete redesign of all material on the site to bring the overall presentation tightly in line with POVA's print and film campaigns.
Moving the site content into a Content Management System to empower POVA directly control the creation and maintenance of their content.

For the design portion of the project, starting with creative compositions from Young and Roehr, we developed a tight style guide, completed the creative design, and transferred all existing site content (roughly a thousand pages) and built out a wide array of new content to conform to the new design. Further, we developed several data-driven tools to be used by POVA's core audiences of Meeting and Convention Planners and general visitors. These tools include a Hotel and Venue locator and a City Comparison tool. These tools were developed in PHP with data stored in a mySQL database. An interesting note is that the PHP code for these tools is actually contained and maintained within the Zope Content Management System.

In implementing the Content Management System, we recommended Zope due to the fact that it is freely available with source code. This enabled us to extend what is "out of box" a quite technically oriented CMS and made it easy to use by POVA's non-technical content maintainers. We managed the specification, development and implementation of these extensions. This included a role-based "fly through" interface in which an author browses through a staged copy of the site, and then is presented with management links appropriate to their authenticated (based on usernames and passwords) role. For instance, if a user is logged in as an author of the "Visitors" section, they can browse the site as usual, but if (and only if) they browse into the "Visitors" section, they are presented with links to add or edit content and other functions appropriate to the role. A user logged in as the site administrator has a far greater array of functions available, including the ability to "publish" any new or modified material to the "live", public site. These custom extensions were done in Perl and also use mySQL as a relational database back-end.

For POVA, this project resulted in a far cleaner and more attractive design, a clear information architecture providing quick, logical access to content, dramatically lowered time and cost overhead with regard to site management, and the ability to "stage" all content for review prior to publishing to their publicly accessible site.