User Friendly and Flexible Content Management Web Portal for a Leading NGO
Kanawha and Charleston Health Department is a team dedicated to the purpose of helping all citizens of the County, achieve for themselves, according to each individual's capacity, a state of physical, mental, and social well-being. KCHD wanted to develop a mobile application for their county people keeping them prepared for any emergency with evacuation guides, emergency contacts and relief camps nearby.
Goals
KC Health Department’s proposed new mobile application intended to enables people to quickly find the emergency sites without having to remember the URL or being online to download the maps. The mobile application needed to provide the users with emergency preparedness guide, evacuation plan map for the different region in the county, emergency contact numbers and medical information. All these emergency map and contact number could be downloaded on phone’s local storage for emergency use.
The application needed to be developed in short duration and to be available for iPhone and Android phones.
Challenges
The content was being maintained in the Kentico CMS, which is already being used by the KCHD for maintain their website content. The content of the application was dynamic, which was coming from Kentico CMS. The application had to be designed with synchronization option to update the mobile application content. The user could access the application content even if the user was not online.
The other challenge was to develop the application in short duration for both iPhone and Android devices with user friendly navigation and effects.
Solution
The Kentico CMS is greatly helped us achieving the all the objectives of the project. Key elements of the solution includes the following
- We enabled the REST services on the Kentico CMS for accessing the content of the pages corresponding to mobile application.
- Generated REST request for the content with hashed authentication to avoid security threats
- Made Jquery Ajax calls using REST requests to get the content of the pages and stored in
- For synchronizing the data, the user is given the option to synchronize whenever the user launches the application and is online.
- Phonegap with HTML5 and Javascript is used for developing the application, which enabled us to develop the applications for iOS and android devices
- Jqtouch is used for the better navigation effects.
Key Criteria for selecting Kentico CMS
- Readily available REST services on the Kentico CMS
- User friendly and flexible content management
- Powerful data migration tools
- Easily maintainable document management system
