Organic South West & Yorkshire Organic Centre

Content management system

Client

The Soil Association

URL

http://www.organicsouthwest.org/ & www.yorkshireorganiccentre.org

Technologies

PHP, MySQL, CSS, XHTML

Go Live date

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Project description:

altcom has developed two client maintained Content Management System (CMS) websites for regional branches of the Soil Association: Organic South West and Yorkshire Organics. Both projects aim to promote the organic market place and bring together producers, processors and consumers. altcom was responsible for defining the Functional Design Specification (FDS) for both projects and also the software development and testing. Graphic design for the Organics South West website was undertaken by altcom associate Nixon Design Limited.

The websites were developed in Lotus Domino for a Domino webserver v6.0 running under Linux. The websites allow remote updating of content by users via Lotus Notes clients and interface with existing Soil Association databases. Remote database access is via the Lotus Domino proprietary query language rather than standard SQL - altcom staff rapidly adapted to this client preferred database access mechanism and delivered the systems well within timescale and budgets.

Information retrieval uses predefined functions and advanced searching to accesses multiple databases and the web. The functionality of the Yorkshire Organics CMS has been further extended to access the main Soil Association database to supply live news, contacts, and trade and consumer information. The next phase of this project is to link to a new Soil Association Oracle contacts database that is currently under development.