The Australian and New Zealand College of Anaesthetists (ANZCA) is the professional organization for more than 4600 specialist anesthetists and more than 1500 anesthetists in training. ANZCA is one of Australasia’s largest medical specialist colleges, responsible for the training, examination and specialist accreditation of anesthetists and pain medicine specialists and for the standards of clinical practice in Australia and New Zealand.
ANZCA’s Faculty of Pain Medicine (FPM) is the first multidisciplinary medical academy in the world to be devoted to education and training in pain medicine. FPM assists the Council to achieve these objectives in the area of pain medicine.
Project Outline
New Plone site for the ANZCA project has recently been launched after all work on site’s re-design and content migration was completed by the Quintagroup team.
1. ANZCA Theme
Quintagroup developed the Plone-3.3.5-driven theme for the ANZCA project, based on the provided design. New ANZCA Plone theme features include:
- Front Page. The site’s front page consists of several text blocks, structured by ‘Portlet Page’, that allows assigning portlets into four slots. The portlets are then shown on the main view of the content object.
- ANZCA Banners/Carousel. With the help of anzca.banner package, developed for this project, banners were added above content area on different site sections according to one of 8 available banner types (banner type defines how banners are located: into 1, 2, 3 or 5 columns, by 1 or 2 in a column, etc). It is possible to add carousel as a site’s banners and it will rotate images, collected by certain collection (collective.carousel).
- Multi-level drop-down menu. quintagroup.dropdownmenu installed together with the theme allows creating and managing a multilevel portal dropdown menu in Plone. Global navigation tabs are generated on the basis of site structure but can be manually overridden if necessary.
- NG Collection Styles. ANZCA Theme comes with NG Collection portlet that extends the Plone collection portlet in order to assign different views for different collection portlets. ANZCA theme uses NG Collection portlets for front page main area portlets, site section front page main area portlets, and Quick Links portlet.
- Subsection’s Style. Every site section/folder can get special style applied, configured at ‘Set Style’ tab settings. It is possible to set the portal header background color, the color of linked text, provide id/path to the image to be used as section logo, hide breadcrumbs, add text to be displayed next to the logo on the portal header area and hide multiple footer links. As a result, we receive different designs for different site sections. Besides, the whole site can get new look using the same ANZCA theme, but with different values specified for basic theme parts. This approach was used for the Faculty of Pain Medicine website, where the main site color, colors of some site parts and site logo are different than in default ANZCA theme.
More Websites
There are several websites that work within the same Zope instance together with the main ANZCA site. These are the 'Faculty of Pain Medicine' website and regional sites. ANZCA Plone theme is used for those sites and allows setting different banners, carousels, and color schemes to make them look different, but in the same style.
2. ANZCA Site Structure Reorganization
The main purpose of a new Plone 3.3.5-based site was to organize existing site content according to the new structure. This issue was rather challenging since the ANZCA project has huge Data.fs database file approximately of 25GB size. So, common methods wouldn’t work here: they would take too much time and effort. Quintagroup was requested to provide effective methods for site correct re-organization, which included:
- Database analysis, including links integrity check
- Broken internal links detection and their re-linking according to new rules
- Eliminate ‘404 Not Found’ errors from other sites and search engines, which emerge after site structure change
Provided Solution
To achieve the above-stated goal, Quintagroup completed the following steps:
- developed Python scripts to detect broken links and implement correct links instead
- provided scripts to move/rename folders and documents while keeping interlinking working
- implemented redirects from old URLs to the new ones
- eliminated 404 errors
- validated results