Colleagues and friends,
I am happy to announce the new website for Kansas City Kansas Community
College, www.kckcc.edu. The site is the culmination of countless hours
of planning, testing, and toiling. I’m announcing here because the site
is powered by RadiantCMS, of course! I intend to make a detailed post
on my personal blog about the site and the process, but here’s a few
stats to hold you over:
300+ Pages
~12 snippets
3-4 layouts
6 extensions (yes, we’re running mental!)
And much more…
We are extremely happy with the ease-of-use and performance that Radiant
provides our team (along with a rock-solid server, Litespeed). As time
goes on, I intend to polish and release some of the extensions which
include LDAP integration and ports of the Mailer and Search behaviors –
I’m sure you’re itching for them!
I submitted a proposal to RailsConf 2007 about our work. Wish me luck
on that! And not to toot my own horn too much, but my design was chosen
from 3 alternatives by the students, and thus I was responsible for the
majority of the CSS and Photoshop work. As you might be able to tell, I
take a lot of my design inspiration from John’s work ;).
Here’s to a happy New Year, using Radiant!
Sean C.
seancribbs.com
p.s. During the process of launching the website, the college also
changed ISPs. There may be intermittent connectivity problems until the
process is complete.
Sean,
Very nice, very no-nonsense. one question: which pages are truly
dynamic? By that I mean not just HTML content statically stored in the
DB, just for curiosiy? It’s a good job considering it’s for a public
insitution and all the baggage that comes with. Commitee meeting,
anyone? 
Very nice … would be interested in hearing about (if any) snags you
might have run into, and also what the backend setup is (using
Capistrano?, etc) … good luck w/ RC07 acceptance, nice case study!
Define ‘truly dynamic’? In some senses all the pages are because they
use Radius code. However, I suspect you mean which ones are cached and
which ones aren’t. The only pages that are not cached are the Mailer
pages. All other pages, whether they generate some content from an
integrated extension or contain only static content, are cached.
Now, I intend to get to this in more detail in my blog post and
potential presentation to RC07, but here’s a basic rundown. Any pages
that have a list of staff/faculty names (with email links), title and
phone number have LDAP generated content. The course
descriptions/syllabi are two pages (one virtual) that is another
mini-application. The 2006-2007 academic calendar (and soon to be other
pages) is ‘dynamically generated’ from custom-built models. Obviously,
the search page uses the ported search behavior (not the big
acts_as_ferret one, but the simpler one). There are other little
touches, like the HR jobs page uses time-expiring content to show open
positions, of which there are none at this point. Almost every page
that has an email address in it has it generated through a Javascript
obfuscator; the generated Javascript code comes from a Radius tag. The
news articles and videos use the Archive functionality.
I called my boss, but is anyone else having trouble hitting it? Might
be the new routing… ugh.
Cheers,
Sean C.