during this coming week we will "soft launch" the new campus map we've been working on. The URL will be http://map.umt.edu/ (that should go live early monday morning). We have set up a blog at http://geogart.com, we will be talking about things like the configuration from start to finish, general notes on development and how and why we did the things we did.
We wanted to create a user experience that was highly interactive and would give people the options to display the kind of information that matters to them. The map uses Open Layers which makes the UI just like iGoogle Maps, but we've taken it one more step and provided the user with a number of toggleable options. The options turn on overlays on the map like "Snow Routes", "Bus Stops","Places to Eat" just to name a few. We realise that there are an infinite number of potential layers, and we would be happy to hear them, but we have limited resources and gathering both the geographic and attribute data (that's the description, photos, phone number and such) and finding someone willing to keep the attribute data up to date is a long process. If you have any thoughts on added features or improvements please let us know!
We have also just set up an instance of Bugzilla to keep track of bugs in the different applications we create/work on. It seems like we have about four or five different projects at any one time, so hopefully it will help us out. Does anyone out there know of any Open Source bug tracking tools? Bugzilla seems to have a pretty terrible interface and the install is more complicated than I think it needs to be.
OLD POST FOR SOME REASON NEVER GOT PUBLISHED
This week marks an enormous milestone for me any the crew at wts (web technology services) on Monday we soft-launched the new University homepage (found at http://umt.edu/beta) and at the same time started using out new Content Management System (cascade by hannon hill) to build and publish a new site for the Alumni Association.
first things first, a bit of history. nearly a year ago on the vice-presidents of our university came to a homepage meeting and declared ""The time is now!" for a new look and feel for the universities web presence. while talking with him we decided not only did we need a new look but a consistant one. so a new design and a new method of distributing it. and so our search for a CMS was born. after a painfully long and arduous journey, which i won't force you to listen to, we came to the conclusion that Cascade Server by Hannon Hill (shameless plug) was the one for us. and so far, other than a few oddities, it has been good to work with. we had a trainer come out 2 weeks after we purchased it and she was very helpful refreshingly honest about capabilities, limitations, and bug fixes. Hannon Hill seems like a company i can trust to do the right thing rather than do what they determine to be best for the margins.
during the process of CMS selection we, in the tech group, were hard at work developing the new homepage in .NET, i know, i know, but the old site was built on it and given our time limitations we didn't have time to rewrite every facet of the site, although all of the code got a good overhaul, rework, rethink and reasonable amount of head scratching went on, old code is always a bit mysterious. One thing one of our committee members brought up was a feedback mechanism on the site. something simple anonymous, and easy. so i built a little ajax box to relay feedback into a database, and set up an RSS feed so we could keep up with feelings of our constituents. let me tell ya google reader has really been quite the rollercoaster ride. lots of people hate it, and lots of people love it. in the first couple of days there were more negative comments than there were positive ones and i started to get worried, but now over all the lovers are winning, good thing too, i didn't want to have to redo that damn thing again!
Our first site in the CMS is going pretty darn well, once we got all the "where are we gonna put all the common files" bologna down, we were good to go.
