ICONS - A portrait of England

Site	ICONS - A portrait of England
Industry	Non-profits
Location	United Kingdom
Provided by	Cogapp
Contact	Tristan Roddis

In 2004, Cogapp started work on its most ambitious project, the incubation of an interactive communications start-up called ICONS (www.icons.org.uk) an online collection of England's icons, exploring national identity and public participation. ICONS’ web presence launched in January 2006 to an unprecedented wave of publicity and participation. The project was commissioned by the UK Government’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport and had a seven figure budget.

Cogapp specified and built a Plone-based content-management system to run
the website for ICONS - a portrait of England. Plone is a feature-rich open-source
framework for managing dynamic websites, and enabled us to provide the
following for the ICONS editorial team:

Intuitive interface - the default Plone interface used for content editing enables
easy management of content with familiar metaphors (cut, copy, paste etc.)

Easy formatting - the in-browser HTML editor makes content formatting tasks
and inserting images and hyperlinks easy for non-technical staff.

Workflow - we created a custom workflow to ensure that content is adequately
reviewed before being put live.

Moderation - all user-submitted content is subject to pre-moderation, with
custom scripts to ease the administrative burden.

Reporting - extensive reporting on database content was coupled with AWStats,
which was used for web log file analysis.

Additionally, Plone helped us to provide the following features for the 'front-end'
site at www.icons org.uk:

Accessibility - the stock Plone install is W3C AA and Section 508 compliant, and
we ensured that our custom XHTML/CSS code maintained this high level of
accessibility.

On-the-fly image generation - we linked Plone content to the open-source
Imagemagick engine to provide custom title graphics for all pages

Sophisticated form control - We used the Plone framework to easily manage the
flow of form entry pages, based on validation of user input.