Centre for Faith and the Media
more features - new design
The Centre for Faith and the Media (CFM) is an independent, non-profit organization to inform, advise and help media and the general public achieve a stronger understanding of spiritual history, practices and values in Canadian society.
CFM has approached Commerx Corporation with the task of adding a new section to their existing website (The Muslim Project) and modifying some visual design elements on their pages. After an assessment of their website and the backend application managing the publishing process, its technology and architecture; Commerx decided that an application rewrite is the optimum solution moving forward.
The application rewrite allowed Commerx not only to produce a higher quality application, but also to introduce new features while incorporating a totally new re-design. The new application also provided a robust platform upon which further additions can be added with relative ease.
Features
 Complete redesign of the website with visual appealing elements and print-like structure.  Meta data presentation and cross navigations between artciles, article themes, and articles related to specific faith groups.  Map display and geocoding for faith-related contact list with the ability to narrow down maps based on faith group and/or region.  Ability to create custom sections and nested contents.  An integrated events calendar where important events can be highlighted, with the ability to narrow down events by faith groups.  A Photo-of-the week and Editorial articles.  An advanced search engine where a more granular search can be performed for either articles or contacts directory.  A simple (yet comprehensive) front-page search mechanism that would allow the user to quickly land on a desired article.  An aggregated content off of CFM's externally added blogging engine. |
Technologies
- In producing the system, Commerx chose Ruby on Rails as a delivery platform. Ruby on Rails is a productive framework that promotes DRYness, ease of maintenance and refactoring.
- Encapsulated functionality through the use of a set of Framework Plugins. That helped cut-down on development time and allowed Commerx to deliver within the required budget. The plugins included acts_as_authenticated for authentication purposes, acts_as_geocodable for geocoding features, upload_column for image uploading functions, YM4R_GM for map display of contacts, comatose plugin for basic CMS functionality, and others.
- Faster response and improved user experience through the use of Fragment caching.
- Blueprint CSS framework helped cut down in cross-browser hacking time, and easily transfer design elements to an external wordpress blogging engine.
- The application runs on a Mongrel Cluster behind an Apache balancer for better scalability and improved performance.
