Joomla distro for the Belgian Police
Belgium, being the small country it is, counts no less then 194 police zones, each of those have their own website. After the release of Joomla 1.5 in 2008 most police zones took the plunge and migrated their site to Joomla 1.5.
Problem definition
When the Belgian Police came to Timble, in 2010, they had around 100 websites running Joomla 1.5. They asked us to build a multi-site platform to increase usability, ease of maintenance and continued growth.
Luckily all websites were already running on the same server and only a few different Joomla extensions were installed across all sites.
But perhaps the greatest downfall to the websites were that they did not had a proper design. The design was based on the default template that came pre-installed with Joomla 1.5.
Key objectives
- Multi-site & multi-lingual distribution of Joomla 1.5
- Fresh, user-friendly design
- Integrated support system
What we did
Multi-site Joomla distribution
In 2011 we started the roll-out of our lean and mean multi-site and multi-lingual distribution of Joomla 1.5. A lot of core Joomla functionalities were removed. What remained was a simplified Joomla, specifically targeted to the needs of the Belgian Police.
Redesign
We worked closely with the police zones on the creation of a new uniform design conform to the styleguide of the Belgian Police. However, we were limited in our movements since we wanted to avoid a huge migration process. The new design had to fit straight into the existing information architecture.
Support & training
Besides the technical development we also started to provide daily support and training sessions to all police zones, around 300 webmasters. Therefor we integrated Zendesk straight into the administrator interface. Making it easy for webmasters to request support and for support staff to follow-up on questions.
