Durham Public Schools

Project Outline:

Durham Public Schools in North Carolina needed a better way to address their visitors' needs. With the help of Six Feet Up, Durahm Public Schools (DPS) are now running a Plone 3.0.6 site with all of their content managed in an efficient manner. Durham Public Schools made the decision to switch from PHP based Joomla to Plone 3 because of Plone's better reputation in security related issues.

The new Durham Public Schools website features a brand new, easy to navigate design. This new design features an AJAX slideshow product that makes creating and managing slideshows easy by putting image files into a folder and adding the text that should be displayed with the images. A Javascript-based accordian effect was implemented for the audience specific shortcuts that are located on the home page. These shortcuts are fully content managed and easy to update.

Six Feet Up strived to make it easy for DPS to manage various content types on the new site. FlowPlayer was used to make Flash implementation a breeze and allowed DPS to keep their current look and feel. The Parents page features dynamically created lists that show subsection folders and their top articles. Each News folder includes an aggregate view to provide links to archives. PromoEngine runs rich content portlets that allow site administrators to add ad-hoc content when needed.

As to managing events, Six Feet Up used Plone4Artists Calendar to pump up the calendar features in Plone so that there is a master district calendar as well as school and departmental calendars. The calendar also features custom fuctionalities that include the support for optional end time on events and a calendar RSS fee.