Mammoth

The Idea

Flinders University Department of Rural Health approached Mammoth Media with a request to make sweeping improvements to their online presence.  A site redesign to bring it up to new web standards (HTML5, CSS3) and more significantly a change to their Content Management System (CMS).

Their existing CMS was difficult to use, proved to be insecure and potentially unreliable, and additionally, caused pain in normal everyday tasks required by the department.  They needed a CMS which was more user friendly and a redesign of back end systems to streamline daily tasks.

The Approach

The approach taken by Mammoth in this instance was a combination of classic waterfall and agile/scrum for new features and requirements.

The project was broken up into four parts.
1. A migration program to convert and migrate their old CMS into the new CMS.
2. A specification document to identify existing functionality of their website.
3. Implementing and streamlining existing functionality as per the above specification document.
4. Creating new requested features.

The Solution

The solution identified an off the shelf CMS which had a large community base and functionally fulfilled the majority of the client’s needs without modification from Mammoth.  The latest version of Umbraco CMS was the best fit. It had a number of community developed modules that fulfilled the majority of the client’s needs.  The most significant of which being the dynamic forms generation, provided by the Contour plugin.

The client is extremely happy with Mammoths implemented solution. The interface for the new CMS streamlines many tasks used on a daily basis by department staff members, and is familiar enough that it is easy to learn for existing staff members.

The site redesign breathes new life into the department’s website and makes both the website and the department more attractive to the public and the website’s ultimate end users.

Technologies

HTML5

CSS3
Umbraco Content Management System
JQuery for client side javascript and dynamic content via AJAX
NHibernate used as the ORM (Object Relational Mapper) for transactional data
FluentMigrator for database migrations and schema control
Castle Windsor IOC (Inversion Of Control) providing dependency injection
Rhino Mocks for mocking objects for TDD
NUnit Framework for driving TDD
Umbraco Model View Controller for dynamic administration pages

Razor Templating Engine for generating widgets and page logic for the website
Razor View Engine is used as the basis for the Email Template System
Contour for Dynamic Form Generation
NForums for a private bulletin board system
Apache TestBench for System Volume Testing (SVT)
SSL Certificate for Website Encryption and Authentication Security 

Mammoth Networks VPS