Web publishing platform for the Belgian Police
An open source web publishing platform for the Belgian local and federal police forces. It uses a component based architecture. Written in PHP, HTML, CSS and Javascript.
Problem defintion
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 and multi-lingual distro of Joomla 1.5 to increase usability, ease of maintenance and continued growth.
The Joomla distro still had a lot of pitfalls mostly because of Joomla's complexity. Most websites had a complicated structure and were not targeted towards the needs of its visitors.
With the increase of mobile visitors a new design and information architecture had to be developed. And it had to be made much easier for webmasters to manage their content.
Key objectives
- Follow an Mobile-first responsive design strategy
- Straight-forward administrator interface
- Leverage WAI-ARIA & HTML data to enhance accessibility
- Conform to WCAG 2.0 level AAA
- Optimize for performance
- Multi-site & multi-lingual
- Open Data
Solution
The first website on the newly developed web publishing platform was released in 2013. Build on top of our in-house developed Timble Platform. Compatibility with Joomla was dropped because Joomla 1.5 reached end of life.
The biggest difference between Joomla and the newly developed platform is that it only contains functionalities that are explicitly required. We do not store the content in one centralized ‘content’ component. Instead, every content type (news, traffic info, contact, …) is implemented as a separate reusable component which exposes a custom tailored interface and workflow.
A new design was developed from the ground up and rethought the information architecture using a mobile-first progressive enhanced responsive design strategy.
Open Police
We strongly believe that an open development model is the only way to foster badly-needed government standards, remove the fear of proprietary lock-in for government agencies, and create a large ecosystem that spans the government as a whole.
It is a great example of how governments can innovate using open source and open standards.
