Portfolio » Forestry Tasmania
This site is a fantastic example of how well we work with the graphic designers at Jaffa. A tremendous combination of their design skills and vision, and our ability as developers has resulted in a fresh modern design, that is as functional as it is bold.
Quite simply the biggest site we've ever completed - after a very long development process going through many design and CMS iterations, www.forestrytas.com.au launched in October 2007.
During the development process, we had a development server for the site so the staff could see progress, and provide feedback. Now that the site has launched, we still provide a development server for the same reasons, at the same time as having 2 dedicated processes running for the live site all on one of our dedicated servers in Canberra.
There are also hundreds of products for sale on the site. In fact, Forestry Tasmania is so big, that the website has multiple shops all wrapped into the single web system with existing online shops for Island Specialty Timbers and the Seed Centre, with tourism-based shops for Tahune Airwalk, Dismal Swamp, the Scottsdale EcoCentre and a general shop launching soon.
The entire system is built up from the Ruby on Rails based ADO-CMS-2007, like Launceston Church Grammar School - proving that there really is no limit to what we can do with such a powerful system!
Obviously with the size of the website, and the company, security is a major concern - user management is a key feature of this CMS, with users being able to be restricted to different admin zones for administrative access.
Pages
Page management is the key feature of the administrative interface. The page tree (left) is used to manage the simple repetitive tasks associated with page mangement, like publishing/unpublishing pages, deleting pages, or even sorting them via a drag/drop interface. 
Because of the sheer size of the site - as mentioned - hundreds of pages and thousands of files, it's essential to have a good search engine running on the site. Public searches automatically highlight key pieces of information and paginate the results for user convenience.
Adding and editing pages takes advantage of the much more detailed editing area. This area enables staff members to edit the page via simple fields and a WYSIWYG editor (far right), so they require little-to-no technical knowledge to be able to update their own content. The custom image library (near right) also helps to map the images into a dynamic flash slideshow - see how the pieces from the admin area come together in the public page (above left).
News & Topics
Forestry Tasmania splits its articles on the website across two main sections: news & topics.
Both sections use the same management interface which employ ajax, WYSIWYG editing, and polymorphics image & file browsers to publish professional looking articles fully manageable by Forestry Tasmania staff. You can see from the pics on the right how the admin interface maps things across to the public published article.
The public areas apply modern techniques such as RSS feed generation, tagging and search engine optimisation to help with the user experience. Recent articles are available on the home page and in the customised news/topics sections (left).
Shops
Forestry Tasmania consists of many organisations and shops: from Island Specialty Timbers, to the Seed Centre, to tourism-based shops such as Dismal Swamp, Tahune Airwalk and the Forest EcoCentre.
Island Specialty Timbers (left) and the Seed Centre (right) already have an online shop presence, with some simply stunning designs from Jaffa integrated with the shopping system we have customised for FT.
We have worked on several e-commerce sites over the years, and have customised on of our systems for use within the FT domain. To have one system able to handle 5 or more separate shops is actually quite a technical challenge, which we have taken on with our expertise and succeeded. We have taken our work on other Ruby on Rails shopping cart systems and extended it for a multi-shop capable system.
Shops can be added within the system, which then match up to the corresponding layouts, so that each shop can have it's own look and feel. Shops also make use of the page management mentioned above.
Categories are managed in a tree-like fashion, so that categories can have sub-categories down to any level, and products can belong and be sorted within multiple categories. Have a look at the tree interface (left) and the category editing (right) and see just how intuitive this system is to use!
Product management is largely independent of the categories, where each product can have different variations (eg small/medium/large) all with their own names, prices and postage. In fact, you can even set the dimensions & the weight of each variation so that postage can be dynamically calculated for the logged in customer whether they're an Australian on international customer.
Map
The Forestry Tasmania map management is a very elegant yet extremely complicated area. It's a dynamic flash system, similar to how we wrote the Kreglinger Wine Estates system with Jaffa.
The public area is a pure flash map (left) where dynamic XML is passed to it from the Ruby on Rails CMS. The dots on the map are managed via an admin flash interface made by Jaffa which we then take the data from and store in the database (below left).
Staff can also manage the different features across all the different destinations via the admin interface (right) matching the public interface (left).
The map is broken up into different regions, which can also be managed (right) and published through to the public map (left).
Destinations themselves are the highlight of the system. The administrative interface (right) is amazingly elegant when you consider from a technical point of view the complexity of the relationships between a destination, region, features and information tabs - all easily edited from the single page!
And see how the information is mapped across to the public flash interface (above left) from Jaffa, where the information tabs come from the admin interface, the little icons are selectable in the admin area, the slideshow comes from the polymorphic image library, the even the video (left) comes from the polymorphic file library... what a system!