Travel Portland consolidates with a content management system

Travel Portland's site brings together information, events, maps, and travel discounts for leisure and business travelers to the metropolitan Portland area.   They needed a content management system to help organize and maintain the content on their site.

Travel Portland started with a mishmash of many technologies, including static HTML, PHP, Perl, and Zope.  Web Collective helped Travel Portland move to one framework, Plone.

Features

There were many features which enhanced the site.

The content in the site syncs with Simpleview, the destination marketing customer relationship management service used in the travel industry.  Synchronization happens automatically every night.  Changes to any object in Simpleview are synced to the Plone site.  Travel Portland staff can also sync single items at any time.

Two business directories were developed:

• Partner Listings.   It's possible to search the partner listings by category, keyword, and if the business has any green certifications.
  

• Hotel Listings.   Web Collective created a custom searching and sorting feature that convention planners can use to assess potential convention sites.  Convention planners can search with several criteria, including maximum hotel occupants, largest meeting room size, and number of meeting rooms.  They are also able to sort results in a table by clicking on parameters of interest.
  

Departmental Contact form

We customized a staff directory to allow Travel Portland to manage their staff members in a hierarchy of departments.  Travel Portland staff can create contact forms that automatically pull in contact details from the related departments and populate contact recipient dropdowns.

Multi-lingual capability

Travel Portland has contractors that do the entry in Japanese, Spanish, German, and Italian.

Workflow with PloneFormGen

Web Collective created custom actions for working with saved data from PloneFormGen forms.  Travel Portland gets several hundred requests for brochures per week and they needed to be able to keep track of which requests had been processed.  They put the output into their business workflow to mail out a brochure.   Web Collective gave them options to: Mark all records as processed, preview all records, preview new records, export in ALL CAPS.  There are also special permissions set on these capabilities.

Media Center

Special permissions allow media personnel to view and download high resolution travel-related images.

Portlets

Web Collective created portlets that show specific partner listings related to the content being browsed.

There are also portlets showing partner categories related to the content being browsed.

Calendar

The site integrates a third-party events calendar.

RSS

The site integrates RSS feeds, such as the Travel Portland blog, Powell's Books blog, Portland weather, arts, and sports.

Server Performance

The server is set up to handle the needs of a frequently-visited site.

Agile Process
 
Travel Portland staff were up to speed with our agile process quickly.