Project complete: Thunderbolt CMS 3

Published on 12^th September 2008 in Websites, tagged Thunderbolt.

I’m pleased to announce the completion of my most recent project; the Thunderbolt Content Management System, version 3. You might think we’re slightly mad not using a standard system like WordPress at Thunderbolt, but it gives us greater flexability and the chance for me to improve my coding skills in the process of building it. If I were creating a similar site today, I would probably use one of the many readily available CMSs, but ours has grown from being a place where we manage our content to much more. The CMS we use now is also part intranet, allowing us to co-ordinate our work as well. Enough introduction though, let’s take a look:

So here we have our homepage, the starting point for all users once they login. On the left we have shortcuts to various pages within the CMS and away from it. On the right, we have a small AJAX chat section powered by the wonderful jQuery and a summary of recent activity in our game tracker below that.

One of the major improvements in the new CMS is the usability of the forms. I’ve now added inline help, which slides down (again, using jQuery) when users click on the red question mark.

We’ve also got inline validation (yep, jQuery), which should prevent a lot of common mistakes which were all too easy to make in the last edition.

Another upgrade has been to the image uploader. In the old CMS, it was really unreliable, but now we have one which renames files for you and resizes them. It cuts the time taken to do images in half, which makes it a lot quicker to publish articles, especially if there are several of them.

As part of the intranet side of things, the new CMS has what I call the game tracker, which catalogs all of the titles people are reviewing or will be reviewing in the near future. We used to organise this via the forums, but now we can see what’s being worked on with greater clarity.

The statistics section has also had a sizeable upgrade, with plenty of graphs to visualise data. I used the excellent pChart to do this, which takes a bit of getting used to, but is extremely flexible. I also included live traffic data, which is taken from our Mint installation. This was fairly tricky and I might publish how I did it at a later date, but if you’d like to know the details, feel free to get in touch.

We also now have our staff handbook integrated into the CMS, which should be a lot easier for new staff members who need to quickly look up something, as opposed to trawling through a PDF file.

Building the new CMS has been a lot of work, but I think it’s been really worth it. Part of what I do at Thunderbolt is to look years ahead and steer us in the right direction, and one of the things we have to do is make the site sustainable. What I mean by that is to be able to keep it running even if all of the editors and most of the staff writers are employed full time and therefore can’t spend ages each day keeping Thunderbolt ticking over. The new CMS makes it easier to publish work, particularly when it comes to organising images, so I think it’ll be a success in this regard.