The Project

Pollenation were asked to work with one of our partners, ANDesign, to design and build a multi-lingual website for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Oman. The website would have to work in Arabic and English and would be administered by a large number of staff working on locations around the world, some only having permissions to translate content, others only approving content.

The Content Management System

After evaluating a range of systems including Zope and Plone, Pollenation opted to extend some of their existing software to add the required functionality.

One of the main requirements was that the site work consistently with both Arabic and English content. Many content management systems are capable of rendering content in any single language, but there are very few that can successfully render multiple character sets, in both left to right and right to left directions, on a single page.

Other aspects of the project that required an innovative software approach were the generation of custom forms using the administration system; the ability to create custom content types for events, galleries, press releases and news; the custom management of uploaded images, automatically resizing and optimising them for different uses; addition of a comprehensive categorisation system to allow the grouping of all content types.

In addition to the software aspects of the project, the css/xhtml build was implemented in a way that uses the same xhtml for both the left to right and right to left versions of the site. This reduced the problems with managing multiple versions of the same html.

The Final Site

This project was completed in October of last year. The client is now in the process of adding significant amounts of content and preparing for the launch of the website.