Brasenose College Oxford CMS goes live

One of the oldest and most famous centres of learning in the world, Brasenose College is celebrating 2008 as its 500th year. As one of the leading colleges at Oxford University it decided that it was time to update its web presence and came to altcom to provide a content management system website that it could use to develop its global reach.

The solution provided by altcom was based around a core of quality assure open source code written in PHP, one of the fastest and most flexible of web development languages. Brasenose also wanted to keep certain elements of its printed design on the web, including some non-standard fonts. This is normally problematic and is usually dealt with by creating an entirely Flash based website or using images in place of text. altcom's solution was to apply SiFR technology. This allows the use of any font without compromising accessibility. it relies on a combination of javascript and Flash to dynamically create the text in the desired font, and if neither of these technologies are available it degrades gracefully to a standard "live" font.

The web team at Brasenose have complete access to all the code as it is provide with open source licensing. This means they can continue to develop the system with or without external help and have no restrictive licensing arrangements to worry about.

The website can be visited at http://www.bnc.ox.ac.uk .