“Perfect” new content management system for fabric fashion site

Adam Khan, Wednesday, April 4th, 2007

Without a content management system, maintaining the relatively simple Carolyn Strauss Collection website had become cumbersome and time-consuming. Vector Computer Consulting sought “a way to automate this process with a Content Management System (CMS) that can take care of the entire process of uploading, resizing, and adding collections to the navigation lists.” EngagingNet provided a solution, and upon trying it Vector principal Matt Weinberg christened it “perfect”.

Vector Computer Consulting Inc. of New York has been maintaining the relatively simple Carolyn Strauss Collection website since 2004. Each month a handful of new textile collections is introduced, with each collection consisting of a variety of images in a fixed format with some variations. Without a content management system however this process had become cumbersome and time-consuming. To quote the Functional Specification: “The Carolyn Strauss Collection seeks a way to automate this process with a Content Management System (CMS) that can take care of the entire process of uploading, resizing, and adding collections to the navigation lists.”

Moreover, the job would no longer be performed by Vector but by the site owner, who is a fashion designer not a computer consultant, so the entire process would have to be on one application, without Photoshop for image editing, for example, or an FTP client for file uploads.

Solution

Vector agreed that rather than creating a bespoke set of scripts, the ExpressionEngine CMS could handle the task easily, and though EE is not free software and may appear to be overkill for this site, it would be quicker and therefore cheaper to do the job by configuring this robust CMS than by rolling a new set of scripts. Plus, having the site sit upon a powerful CMS would make it easy to add more functionality in the future, such as a mailing list or an RSS feed.

The solution utilizes EE’s photo gallery module to automate the uploading and processing of images and thumbnails, even rotating and cropping where required. The collections are then displayed using the regular weblog module.

This solution allowed for a completely linear content management process that Vector could write up as a series of instructions for the client to follow.

Results

“PERFECT!!!!” exclaimed Vector principal Matt Weinberg in an email. “I’m extremely impressed you were able to pull this off.”