Site:

http://www.capecoral.net

Situation:

Like many city sites, The City of Cape Coral had a huge amount of content that had accumulated over time from many contributors. The costs associated with maintaining the site were high, and it was a huge project to change navigation or user interface.

There were many internal stakeholders and clear objectives.

Requirements:

1. Open source and BSD style licensed (very liberal licensing)
2. The open source project had to be active (consistent bug fix and feature releases).
3. Proven and secure.
4. Consistent releases (bug fixes and features) / Upgrade process.
5. Teams of contributors and managers need to edit and approve content
6. Events Publishing for different departments
7. Document Publishing
8. Publishing of News and other similar content
9. Ability to "Sub Brand" areas to allow for autonomy and "ownership" for departments.
10. Fresh new creative look that could be changed over time.
11. Ability to grow with the platform.

Solution:

1. DotNetNuke is BSD (Style) Licensed and gives complete latitude to develop, modify and distribute as the developer sees fit. There are no encumbrances as some other Open Source licenses have.
2. The DotNetNuke Project releases quarterly, has an active roadmap, and a large international development team. The DotNetNuke Corporation (the official project owner and maintainer of the DotNetNuke Web Application Framework) works to keep the development roadmap on course and the developer ecosystem thriving.  Professional Support Services are available for end users, consultancies, and organizations using the platform.
3. The DotNetNuke Core is a time tested secure platform that passes security reviews with flying colors. Security is a top priority and there are clear processes for reporting of security flaws and a mandate to patch and release whenever the flaws are reported. A review of any popular security advisory site (such as www.secunia.com) will confirm the commitment to security.
4. The DotNetNuke Platform releases quarterly (historically) but this timing may vary. Every release since the beginning of the project can be upgraded through the built in DNN installer process.
5. DotNetNuke has granular role based permissions allowing for the specification of specific roles or users to be "editors, content managers, or approvers". AppTheory leverages its "CMS" Module for page level content that has rich text editing capabilities (WYSIWYG), versioning, and approval routing / notification. This allows large organizations to create different teams to handle different areas of the site, including different departments having different approvers based on different content types.
6. AppTheory leveraged its event calendar for the different departments along with Event Aggregators that allowed for specific calendars to aggregated from other calendars on the site (and filter based on categories).
7. AppTheory used a simple document publishing module to allow for documents to be posted quickly and easily. The users can track how many times the document has been downloaded as well.
8. One of the big problems with the conventional page model is that every time you have news to post, you create a new page -- which leads to a mess. AppTheory recognizes this and worked with COCC to determine where a "News" or "Articles" module would be more appropriate. This keeps consistent formatting and allows for aggregation on the front page and other areas. This module is used EXTENSIVELY across this site.
9. Recognizing the need for "Sub-branding" (basically sub-sites that carry the same overall look of the city, but have some autonomy with respect to promotional imagery, content and structure), AppTheory created a Navigation Paradigm that allows the departments to focus the users on the department.
   
   Some of the departments included Economic Development, Parks and Recreation, and the Police Department.
10. The skinning concepts that back the DotNetNuke platform means that when the city wants to change the look of the site, this can be leveraged by the creation of new skin files as opposed to a historical redesign process that typically represented a complete overhaul of the site.
    
    AppTheory created the design for COCC with the goal of allowing for department specific looks.
11. The DotNetNuke platform allows for custom module development so the city can expect to grow its tools and carry those tools forward as new versions are released. No longer will past investments in functionality be wasted.

Significant Modules Used:

Treeview Navigation, CMS, Document Management, Event Calendars, Articles, Galleries, Ratings and Comments.