On Wednesday 24th April I attended the Socitm Spring Conference at The Royal College of Surgeons and wanted to share my thoughts and experiences with you all. On the morning of the event, I woke up in London, a significant change to rural Shropshire and wondered what the day ahead may have in store. It was apparent from the Chair’s introduction that this was going to be a day full of interesting discussions, debates and ideas. The event got off to a great start with a presentation on Digital Insights by Martin Ferguson (Director of Policy and Research at Socitm) which was followed by a very entertaining presentation by Carl Haggerty from Devon County Council who talked about being open …
The last few years have brought about a lot of change for Shropshire Council. For us, this has also meant a lot more interaction with other councils and private organisations when collaborating on various projects, or through attending training courses or social events. Whenever we meet a fellow web developer/designer the topic of conversation always moves around to technology, and quite often onto what we use the most in our day jobs. Each time I have this type of conversation I think “I really must get around to writing these down in a blog post” – and now, finally, I have actually put that thought into action… What we use… Notepad++ One of the most commonly-used pieces of software we …
When the decision was made to use Umbraco for new.shropshire.gov.uk it was at an interesting point in the lifecycle of the CMS. The current version at that time (and the one we had based our initial investigations on) was 4.7.1, but a newer, more refined version (Umbraco 5) was in beta, and would be released well within the timescales of our project. Being the adventurous types (and the fact that the majority of us had just completed ASP.NET 4 and C# training making it an easier learning curve for us), we opted to develop the prototype site using Umbraco 5. The main draw of this version was the advantage of having a more refined behind-the-scenes architecture and a streamlined templating …
For those following our recent posts, you will have noticed a lot of chatter about the work behind new.shropshire.gov.uk. This has covered pretty much all the stages of the project, from the initial announcement of the prototype site right up to the launch, but one thing we haven’t covered is our choice of CMS – Umbraco. Over the past few years we have been looking for a replacement for our own in-house developed CMS, hoping to find something that can be easily adapted to suit the ever-changing requirements of our customers. We’ve investigated a number of commercial systems, but have repeatedly found that they either come with restrictive development frameworks, or we have fallen foul of the limited budget we …
Eye catching title huh? In my previous post (Open Source? Yeah, we’ve heard of it…) I talked in brief about how we were using Open Source and how it was saving the Council significant amounts of money. We have now calculated that we are directly saving the council £204k over an initial 5 year period and are going to save a further £228,905 every five years thereafter. How are we saving this money? We built a search engine framework to replace two third-party products. A website search engine and an address search system. These systems were costly and becoming more expensive as additional functionality was required. So we decided that we’d build our own search engine to cover the needs of …
Dear Open Source, We’d just like to give you a lovely big, warm hug from everyone in the team. We <3 you Open Source! Yours truly Chris Jones Architecture team leader Architecture and Implementation department Shropshire Council