To be more precise, I would like to seek your opinion on the cost and complexity of renovating this website for our company, a health support services organization for General Practices and other sorts fo Doctors:
www.nwmdgp.org.au
(Previously it was a mambo website from 2004, but do not be concerned about it. Its just incidental. No software upgrade sought.)
We are changing our image to a new brand name "Impetus", and my Executive Officer has given me the opportunity to consider making up a new website rather than upgrade the existing one. I feel it is actually more economical and manageable to build a new one, rather than upgrade the existing one. So we would in our own time, manually cut and paste content over, perhaps editing it as needs be, or even rewriting from scratch. No direct transfers sought.
Presently, there has been a graphic artist engaged to create the front and also contrbute their ideas on a navigation structure. However, their work can be extended and adopted to make the themes/templates necessary to work with Joomla. Presumably you might collaborate with them.
However, my main requirements of a new Content Management System in the immediate future is that is natively supports (not needing or much, extra software development):
- Workflow (Author submits an article to an Editorn Moderator (1 of 2) who then approves it to be send to the Executive Office for final review and public publishing)
- Versioning (multiple versions of the article can be maintained)
- Multi-Dimensional Access to website (A mixture of staff and external users, of different levels of authority, who may or may not see different areas of the website.)
The key idea is to allow authorized end users to contribute to the website, where previously, there was a structure (and a belief) that only one persoon should and could maintain the website content.
So this is what i thought of doing initially. However, in order to establish a good foundation, you might also consider including:
- The Community Builder features
- Form Builders
- Newsletter Functionality
- Photo Album (actually there is a content need to show a organizational chart with Staff Photos.)
- Addtional to article postings:
- Printer Friendly/Print Article Only page (Just the Article, without menus)
- Save As PDF
- Email this page
- Calendar Entries: like "Add Event to Calendar" to save event times into the Calendar of Outlook or Thunderbird/Sunbird.
- Comments (like a blog permits)
- Be Browser/Email Client Friendly, as we do have non-Microsoft Members.
- Subscribe to RSS for specific categories of the website.
- Alerts/latest Updates section on main page
- Section on page of our 2 main recent newsletters (Friday Facts and North West Courier)
Perhaps over time, it might be possbile to add additional functionality like:
- Event Registrations
- Surveys
- Non-Staff Authoring (Guest Authors)
- Wikipedia and/or Knowledge Base
- Discussion Forums
- Project Management features like
- Issue Tracking
- Task Tracking
- Scheduling
- Google Maps of selected Member Locations (Adress, contact details and their opening hours, this might be an extention module, or a programming mini project though...) This is what we have at the moment:
www.nwmdgp.org.au/index.php?option=com_c...d=143&Itemid=662
Presumably, you would also be advocating best practices, for example insisting any form have some means of preventing spamming, like entering letters/numbers from a distorted image.
If you can, please comment in a reply.
Thank you for your kind attention and clarification.
Regards,
Colin Sheppard
Contact via Email: colin at nwmdgp.org.au
