Launched in the summer of 2010, the Elyria Municipal Courthouse redesign is one of many upcoming projects that was a collaboration with Bryan Salva of BSalva.com. Bryan is a local designer from Elyria and handled much of the design and photography for the site. My role was largely focused on choosing and implementing a content management system, as well as laying out content and adding some of the JavaScript functionality to the site.
Some of the site features include a JavaScript frequently asked questions section, embedded Calendar and Directions from Google, a JQuery image rotator for the home page, as well as an HTML wrapper that would let the third party records software that was outside the scope of our redesign load seamlessly into our new design template.
Selecting a CMS for the new site was an exciting experience because, rather than jumping into a third-party Joomla template and moving the old site’s content over, we wanted to do something a little bit different. We use Joomla a lot, but this site really didn’t need much of its functionality. We really just needed a low-key CMS that met a couple of simple requirements.
First, we wanted a CMS that was easy to theme. I’ve coded templates for both Joomla and WordPress in the past and found that WordPress was, while not perfect, light years ahead of Joomla in terms of ease of custom template implementation. Second, we wanted something that was extremely lightweight. I’ve had a lot of experience showing small government employees Joomla in the past, and for people who aren’t necessarily webmasters by trade Joomla can seem a little overwhelming for someone that’s new to site management.
We found both of these things and more in the Get Simple CMS and, in addition to having Bryan’s finished design up and running as a fully working template in almost no time at all we were greeted by another ultimately welcome surprise. Get Simple doesn’t use a traditional SQL database to manage its content. Data is stored entirely within the file system using XML. This was extremely attractive to us for ease of portability, as well as something that we felt provided an extra layer of security.
