University of Minnesota Press Launches Revamped Website Powered by Plone

Plone Website Spotlight | From time to time, we highlight websites of note built using Plone. This time we feature the University of Minnesota Press' new website.

The University of Minnesota Press launched a new presence on the web Wednesday with the help Boston-based Plone integrator Jazkarta.  In addition to a completely new look and feel, the new site offers innovative new functionality built using a variety of products available for Plone.

Emily Hamilton, who oversaw the the project as Marketing Director for the UMN Press, is very happy with her first Plone experience.  "The flexibility and high-powered organization tools, as well as the intuitive content management interface, are some of our favorite features. It allows us to make the most of our large amounts of content and deep publishing list of more than 2000 in print books," she explained.

And while there are many aspects of the site that draw attention, Emily says that its the Explore page where she likes to start when showing off the site "The Explore page features the faceted search and I think it's a fun, dynamic, interesting browsing experience that encourages an immersive experience in our books."  

The faceted search is built using eea.facetednavigation, which was developed by the European Environment Agency.

In building the site, Jazkarta relied on a stable of products and technologies available for Plone. Some of the other 3rd party products that were used to build the site were:

  • Diazo & plone.app.theming - used for the site theme
  • PloneFormGen - for all inquiry forms
  • PloneKeywordManager - for easier managing of keywords and taxonomy
  • PressRoom - for providing press releases at http://www.upress.umn.edu/press
  • RedirectionTool  - for making short URLs that redirect to deeply nested pages within the site

Jazkarta developed a custom theme using Diazo and plone.app.theming;  custom content types used throughout the site for books, journals, and catalogs, and used transmogrifier to migrate information on all the UMN Press' books and journals to  from Filemaker Pro into Plone.

Visit the UMN Press website at http://www.upress.umn.edu/

You can find out more about how Jazkarta delivered this site by visiting their website.

From time to time, the Plone communications team will be highlighting new and interesting websites built using the Plone content management system.  If you have created a website with Plone and would be interested in being the subject of a future article, check out this post for more information.