Hi everyone, I work in the Information Systems department of the City of Escondido, California. About 18 months ago, I was tasked to evaluate low cost and no cost CMS solutions to bring much needed modernization of our web presence. After evaluating more than a dozen open source solutions, mojoPortal was the clear winner for us. The combination of ease-of-use, security, and depth of features just can't be beat by any other open source CMS. 

For the past ten months or so, we have been working to convert our current web site (thousands of stand-alone HTML pages and PDF documents) into mojoPortal. We hope to be live with our mojoPortal site before the end of the year. Last night, we demonstrated our new site to the Mayor and City Council of Escondido at the Council meeting. If you are interested, you can watch a rebroadcast of this meeting here. On the right side, click on "WORKSHOP: OVERVIEW OF NEW CITY WEBSITE" to see our demo. This video is not copyrighted at all (everything produced by government is in the public domain). If you feel that this would be useful, please download it and use it as you see fit.

This morning, the North County Times newspaper published an article about our upcoming web site. They gave some great coverage to mojoPortal as well.

Thank you, Joe and everyone, for this great product! I hope that the publicity we are bringing will help the project in the future.

Jamie

Hi everyone, I wanted to follow up and let you all know that the main City of Escondido mojoPortal site went live on December 2, 2010, and another brief blurb about it was published in the newspaper. We have made a very visible effort to solicit site feedback on the new site, and have been getting  many positive remarks about how easy it is to navigate and use, along with some good suggestions and bug reports. Next will be new versions of our Police, Fire, Library, Recreation, and Sports Center sites, and brand new sites for the aquatics club and skate park. Being able to so easily host and segregate independent sites under a single installation of mojoPortal has been a real blessing.

One of the great strengths of mojoPortal is the ability to easily develop and integrate our own custom features. We were able to take advantage of this with a utility bill lookup feature that lets citizens pull up their previous bills in PDF format, and parcel lookup to retrieve information about land parcels within the City, and download that information to a CSV file. We have plans for many more custom features, including adding the ability for citizens to pay their utility bill and other bills online. For this we will be developing a feature that communicates with our internal core Financials systems across secured web services.

I'd like to publicly thank Joe Audette, Joe Davis, and everyone else who has helped us out on the forums over the past year. This project would not have been anywhere close to successful without all your great help and hard work.

Now that our new site is live, I will begin turning the majority of the site administration and skinning duties over to our webmaster. I hope to be able to devote more of my time to feature development and core improvements to mojoPortal (which I will of course share with the project), as well as continue contributing on the forums and to the documentation here on the site and help files within mojoPortal. As the old saying goes: The more you give, the more you get!

Jamie

Hi Rick, thanks, I appreciate that!

Yes, that's an Artisteer skin, designed by our webmaster Anne Morgan. We're both really grateful that Joe added support for the Artisteer skins. She said that she really likes Artisteer, but her main complaint is she wishes there were an easier way to use custom colors in designs. Hopefully the Artisteer crew will come up with something a little better there.

Google translate wasn't hard at all. Maybe I'll write up a document about how we did it. Here is a brief rundown:

First of all, I should say that Joe does have Google Translate available as a feature that you can just drop into a page, but I wanted it to work across our whole site (i.e. placed in layout.master rather than on individual pages), and also wanted to use some other options that mojoPortal doesn't yet have support for. So, I visited the Google Translate Tools page, and selected the following in optional settings: Display Mode: Inline, horizontal; Track Translation Usage in Google Analytics. I then grabbed the generated code and pasted it into our layout.master, inside the div class="topnav", right below the ul containing the administrative (sign in/sign out) links.

I then had to do much experimentation with CSS to make things work right with the Google translate toolbar, so it didn't cause the page to go out of whack when activated. I added my final layout fixes to style-artisteer-overrides.css as follows:

/* Positioning for Google Translate widget */
#google_translate_element { margin: -6px 30px 0 0; float:right; }
.art-sheet { margin-top:0px !important; }
#art-main {top: 18px;}

The picture slide show was actually a piece of cake, thanks once again to mojoPortal. That's just an HTML feature, with the "slideshow of elements" setting enabled! It literally could not be any easier.

I know what you mean about the mass of content. Luckily we have Anne, who is a very talented web technician. In addition to designing skins, she brought all that content from our old HTML site, reorganized it, and got everything loaded on the new site over the past year, all while still maintaining our existing sites. I think out of everyone, she is the most relieved that we are now live! We are all looking forward to finishing our site conversions, and delegating a lot of her more menial and routine data updating tasks out to the people who want to take ownership of their own areas of the site--this was one of the main impetuses for implementing a CMS, and mojoPortal's security structure will work perfectly for us.

Jamie

This morning I added all the necessary redirects to put the new mojoPortal Escondido Police Department site online. We're really getting these conversions down to a science now!

Hi Jamie

Great site.  Nice Job!!!!

Our local Volunteer Fire Hall wants me to do a Website for them (for free) and I will be showing them this one.

BTW  the last menu item "E-Services wraps down to a new line" on Firefox 4.0 for me.

The Escondido Public Library is now live on mojoPortal. This is our first site to make use of mojoPortal's ability to assign different skins by page. Thanks to Donna, our library webmaster and designer, the kids and teens areas of the library site each have their own unique look and feel. I especially liked the "sticky note" headings in the teens area.

Jamie

Looking great! Very cool with the section specific skins! I've added this one to the mojo Sites list.

Best,

Joe

Hey Jamie,

Thanks for the great testimonials!

Your new fire dept site is looking good!

And thank you for becoming actively involved in the community and your efforts to help others! You have been a huge help to myself and others!

Best,

Joe