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Powerful and Scalable

Animalcarpet CMS is currently used on sites supporting thousands of unique users per day and millions of page impressions per annum. It's used in major collaborative websites for the British Council and WCL Group each with thousands of participating users. It's built to high levels of conformance to web standards for design and accessibility (XHTML 1.0, WCAG Level AA) and supports a wide variety of content types including embeddable content (YouTube,VOKI, WorldTimeServer), as well as online content via API calls to services such as Twitter and Google Maps.Other features include:

  • CSS layout and content styling.
  • Integrated translation management software allows all content on a site to be translated using XLIFF-compliant translation software.
  • AJAX-enhanced user interface with fallback options for non-javascript enabled devices. Integrated Newsletter generation and distribution tool.
  • Video transcoding for all standard formats (MPG, MPEG4, WMV, H264, QUICKTIME, 3GPP etc).
  • User subscription tools.
  • Integrated free-text site search.
  • Cross-browser design and compatibility testing.

Flexible

We appreciate that requirements differ from one organisation to the next so no two systems should ever be the same either. Animalcarpet CMS is highly customisable so that the delivered system acts exactly as you wish it to. Many features can be turned on and off depending on your needs. It's not a one size fits all solution and your customisation options are not just restricted to a choice of background colour, logo and company name. Many aspects of the system can be customised, from page templates, the CSS, the items that appear on the sitemap, the resource types that are available, even the fields to include in the newsletter subscription system. We'll even add bespoke components so the system behaves exactly as you need it to.

Secure

Animalcarpet is a hosted solution which means that we have the responsibility of making sure your site and your data is safe - and we take that responsibility very seriously. Debian Linux, which we use on our servers, is one of the most secure and robust environments available, our software protects your data against a attack and our advanced Access Control mechanism allows you to specify to the level of an individual users exactly which parts of your site a user can see and the features they have access to. Finally, we backup daily to ensure your work is not lost.

  • Protection against cross-site scripting, reflective XSS and SQL Injection attacks.
  • NFS 4 style Access Control System for all content and system objects. Allows individual and group access permissions to be applied to individual items of site content and system objects.
  • Audit trail for all site content and system object editing actions.
  • Content monitoring tools and alerts for collaborative environments.
  • Embedded content is permitted from selected sites (eg YouTube video) but is filtered.

Components

Animalcarpet CMS supports a wide variety of user-defined content types. In addition, bespoke content types can be easily added to match the the business requirement of the site publisher. to the following list. All types are automatically included in the free-text site search mechanism, can be included within automatically generated sitemaps and are coverered by the sites access premissions and auditing systems. The current resource types supported by the system are:

  • Text
  • Filtered embedded content (eg YouTube video)
  • Images, image galleries and slideshows
  • File downloads
  • User polls
  • Newsletter and site subscription tools
  • News and Events listings
  • Blog content and user comments
  • Discussion forums
  • Folders for organising files and other content
  • Password-protected dropbox
  • Podcasting
  • Video hosting and transcoding
  • Tag clouds
  • Twitter feeds
  • Case studies
  • Press releases
  • Job vacancies
  • Location maps

Read more about the different resource types.

About Paul Campbell

Paul Campbell has 20 years' experience in computer support and programming. Originally working in database development, network and user support at the London Borough of Newham, Paul switched to developing systems for the internet in 1997 with his first web application being a document management system written in Perl. Paul was a developer at Bibliotech Ltd (2000-2002), working on their Schoolmaster education portal and Officemaster (office productivity tools) before going freelance in 2002. He has extensive experience specifying, designing and maintaining high-volume database-backed websites using both Open Source and Microsoft components. Paul has a passion for creating simple-to-use, accessible websites, and a specialism in developing multilingual web portals in the education sector. Paul has a Masters degree in Computing Science from the University of London (1999) where his dissertation study was on Internet groupware.

Curriculum Vitae

You can get the latest version of my CV at the following link. Download a copy of Paul's C.V.

Food Service Portal

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This project involved the development of an intranet service for Graysons Restaurants to make available food service specifications, recipes and preparation tips to chefs in their many restaurants.