Abu Dhabi Urban Planning Council
The Abu Dhabi Urban Planning Council (UPC) is the strategic planning agency for the Emirate of Abu Dhabi. The Abu Dhabi Urban Planning Council is responsible for defining the shape of the Emirate, along with the associated land uses, to ensure the development of a professionally designed, sustainable and well-managed urban environment, which incorporate world-class transport and infrastructure systems.
The Challenge
We were assigned the task of developing a multi-lingual archival frontend / web portal. The archive was to be centrally managed from within a single CMS, with over 120 pages of provided content organised according to a taxonomy structure.
The full stack
For the public facing frontend we were tasked with building the main Urban Council portal on top of the CMS. A micro-site for the Estidama initiative and user generated campaign/registration mini-sites were another requirement (e.g. registration for a training course hosted by the Council).
Enter Umbraco
Considering the very short project life cycle, and the requirements of the site, a popular open source CMS platform was picked - Umbraco. We were impressed by Umbraco's intelligent integration of XSLT. More importantly Umbraco had a modular object type model which meant you can as a CMS administrator theoretically create an infinite possible number of categories, very important for an archival platform. These two aspects were critical to our strategy as we could modify the programming logic required to organise and display content (listings, galleries, modules) as well as parse user submitted content without compilation and refactoring related delays right up to the testing phase.
Umbraco at the time had limited multi-language support, so a necessary milestone to tackle was implementing 1:1 navigation support for multiple languages. We developed a library that handled URL callbacks per the user's language preference.
Project outcomes
Going with the Umbraco platform resulted in a multi-tenant platform deployed and delivered on time, and (to the client's surprise!) meeting all of the project's requirements.
