Pemaquid Communications

A few weeks ago Pemaquid launched a new Web site for the Maine Health Access Foundation (MeHAF). MeHAF advances its mission through three strategic priorities: advancing health care reform in Maine; promoting patient and family-centered care; and strengthening Maine’s health care safety net.

The goal of our redesign project was to help give MeHAF the online tools needed to share knowledge, publicize the work of its grant recipients and strengthen its position as a thought leader on health care issues in Maine.

When MeHAF approached Pemaquid in January of this year, their Web site was not helping them advance their strategy. For several years they had been using a rigid, hard-to-use content management system that had been built using proprietary programming on an ASP.net platform. The system was balky and hard to adjust to meet changing needs. MeHAF staff had a tough time understanding how to manage the CMS, let alone how to use it to communicate quickly and effectively online.

Pemaquid responded by developing a custom version of our Pemaquid Content Manager, built atop the Django framework. We were able to quickly architect a solution that allowed MeHAF to preserve and migrate all the data from their existing site. At the same time, we were able to dramatically improve their ability to self-publish content on the site. Their page templates are much more flexible and search-engine-friendly, so over time we hope to see their search positioning (already relatively good for relevant topics) improve.

With the new Content Manager in place, MeHAF can update every page on their site – and create new ones – in a way that is easy to manage and is search-engine friendly. They can even easily control naming conventions (i.e. “mysite.com/mysection/mypage”). They can update news and events, and can update the contents of a custom library of Resources.

With a little help from graphic artist Arielle Walrath we updated the look and feel of the site to match design elements from their most recent annual report, designed by Portland agency Pennisi & Lamare.

As with all Pemaquid sites, MeHAF.org is built with bulletproof, cross-browser compatible CSS and xHTML and is structured so it’s easily accessible to folks with visual and physical impediments and who use assistive devices to browse the Web.

The solid base we’ve established also puts MeHAF in position to incorporate linkages to their nascent social networking system, and Django’s Open Source framework will allow us to build an online community for sharing health information through an onsite social network/forum, should MeHAF decide to move in that direction.

Whatever they decide to do next and however they choose to approach it online, the Pemaquid Content Manager will give them a platform that allows their site to easily grow and change along with their online communications objectives.

A little while ago I said I’d start posting some reviews of good content management systems. Many of you are familiar w/t/Usual Suspects – WordPress, Drupal and Joomla – so I thought I’d start w/a review of something you may not have heard of: Django.

Django was developed by The World Company as a CMS for the Lawrence Journal-World, the newspaper in Lawrence, Kansas. It was developed for the fast-paced, high-traffic news environment and was designed to make it easy to set up and easy to plug/unplug various modules (”apps” or “models” as they are known in Django-lingo).

Incidentally, it was named after jazz guitarist Django Rheinhardt. As a musician myself, I appreciate that.

Django is Open Source. It has been released under a BSD license.

Nifty. But all of you who are looking for a 5-minute install FTW will be sadly disappointed. Django installs are not for the faint of heart. Unlike the Usual Suspects, which are written in PHP, Django was written in Python. It also requires some server administration skills to configure. Fortunately, there are some hosting providers who specialize in Django.

Though it can be a challenge to set up initially, once configured Django is designed so that you can very rapidly plug in different chunks of some pretty sophisticated interactive goodness depending on your needs.

The idea is that you don’t want to be reinventing the wheel for content management with every site. This is known as the DRY Principle.

With a basic, rock solid Django framework in place, Web designers and developers can focus on the fun stuff – a custom look and feel, CSS and extensions to Django’s core functionality.

Django’s great for big sites that need things like member management(w/varying access privileges), events calendars, e-commerce and job applications. In other words, for sites that need more than the simple blog-based content management WordPress provides.

Here’s the lowdown:

Pro

Solid modular code – you don’t have to reinvent the wheel or rewrite most of the bedrock code you’ll need for most sites. You can concentrate on customization. There are models for e-commerce, Google Calendar – you name it.

Speedy setup - no, it’s won’t be speedy the first time you do it. But once you’ve got the knack, it’ll be a breeze.

Plays nice w/Google – Python, Django’s bedrock language, is one of the three “official” languages supported by Google. You can run Django and Python on the Google App Engine – meaning apps you develop will scale easily while they hum along on Google AE’s servers.

Open Source – No licensing fees to obtain, and the codebase is supported by a large – and growing – developer community

Con

Python – Just when you thought you had learned all the code you needed to rule the Web (*sigh*). Once you learn it, however, Python is a “pro” and not a “con”.

Server Administration Skills required – Can you say “shell access”? There, I knew you could. Get ready to cuddle up w/your favorite Terminal app.

Maine Sites Running Django

Flyfi.com – Portland-based, a social-ly, musical-ly site. Formerly Goombah and run by Emergent Music.

Maine College of Art – an application for applying online.

Southern Maine Community College – a personalized information request form.

Django Links

Django Project – documentation, tutorials… and your gateway to the developer community.

Django for non-programmers – Jeff Croft has a great post on the benefits of Django for front-end designers.

Django – Google Code – If you need help, here’s one good place to look.

Django Facebook Group (requires FB Profile) – here’s another good place to look for help, if you’re on Facebook (and everyone’s on FB now, right?)

Django pluggables – apps you can plug into your Django project.

Have you tried the Django tango? What are your thoughts?

The Maine Commission for Community Service works to get people involved in volunteer activities throughout the state. The Commission’s site, at MaineServiceCommission.gov, is the place where they report to the public and their stakeholders how effective they’ve been in achieving their goal.

Last week Pemaquid launched a new and improved site for the Commission. Our main objectives:

Create a more up-to-date, professional image. The creative available from MCCS was limited. It consisted of a logo created in house. We developed a hi-res version of the logo so they could use it in other materials, and then we created the layout and color palette around it.

Improved content management. The Commission stores literally hundreds of reports and publications on the site. They publish events, photo galleries, news releases, and they have a fairly unique way of posting information about goings-on, called Maine Volunteer Fare. That and other content is handled with a custom version of the Pemaquid Content Manager, our home-cooked CMS.

Accessibility. As a state agency, the MCCS must adhere to the Maine’s Accessibility Policy, which sets fairly high standards for meeting the needs of the visually/physically impaired. As always, our intent was to ensure accessibility without compromising the elegance of the site’s design concept. We think we’ve done that.

There are a bunch of other goodies reflecting the latest techniques: the jQuery Cycle plug-in is used to rotate the home page “marquee slides”; and for the first time we used css_browser_selector.js as a means to serve up different styles depending on the browsers (we used it mainly to adjust the navigational font in IE (further reading on CSS browser selector, many thanks to Jen Ecker for dropping this into the codebase).

Executive Director Maryalice Crofton and Public Relations Representative Rochelle Runge are a joy to work with and Pemaquid will continue to assist the MCCS with ongoing content development and by providing hosting for the site (Pemaquid also hosts another Commission site, VolunteerMaine.org). We’re proud to support their mission of fostering community service activities and a spirit of volunteerism in Maine.

There are a ton of content management systems out there (see CMS Matrix). So how do you decide which one is right for you?

In selecting a content management system – or CMS – for your Web site, it’s important to remember that you don’t want to compromise the user experience or the accessibility of your site just so you can slap another page up there.

You also don’t want to become a slave to your CMS; it should work for you, not the other way round. It shouldn’t unduly compromise your ability to organize content on your site.

Some of the most popular systems include: WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Expression Engine and Silver Stripe (all of these are open source; Silver Stripe was used to create the Democratic National Convention Web site).

At Pemaquid we’ve worked with dozens of these content management systems. Usually, however, we stick with the one we’ve developed ourselves: the Pemaquid Content Manager. The basic package can be installed quickly and inexpensively, but it’s easily customizable.

Are we proud of our little CMS? Yes. Is it the right solution for all situations? No.

Over the next few weeks we’ll take an in-depth look under the hood of some of the most popular content management systems and examine the pros and cons of using them.