Website Features and Technical Information

The City updated its website in the Spring of 2008. Here are some of the new features of the website...

Content

New website organization emphasizing topical navigation & multiple paths to content.
Enhanced search engine to help you find what you are looking for.
Service-centered organization: City services are listed throughout the website with most areas prominently displaying related and featured services.
Additional Spanish language content: Many core pages of the website feature Spanish translations to facilitate access by our community's Latino and Spanish-speaking populations.
myBloomington: We have developed an online application -- myBloomington -- to provide location-based information about City services available at individual City addresses.
Enhanced online maps: Our location tool helps you find City facilities and points of interest in the community using the the Google Maps API.
Data Center: We have started populating our new data center area with new information including noise violation charts, with more to come.

Updated visual design and navigation changes.
Standards compliant for widest possible browser support and accessibility for end users. (Special thanks to the City's Council for Community Accessibility and IU's Adaptive Technology Center for their invaluable assistance!)
Ability to easily switch to translations of content (when available).

Built atop PHP & MySQL framework, running on Apache webserver and the Linux operating system.
XHTML page output with support for RSS feeds
Enhanced calendar features including downloadable .ics standard (iCal) formatted calendars.
We make copious use of Google Maps API for location display and mapping. We also make available location information in downloadable KML format for use in Google Earth.
Incorporates Open source components including...
- Zend Framework;
- tinyMCE WYSIWYG text editor;
- Lucene search engine; and
- Subversion for management and versioning of website documents.
Open source: the CMS foundation of this website is free software under the GNU GPL license and may be downloaded for use by the public.
The section-based navigational structure for the website is a directed acyclic graph. Any given section of the website can have multiple parents. In practice this means that as a user, you can navigate to certain sections of the website through a number of different paths. The website breadcrumbs show the current navigation path (or the shortest if you are jumping directly into a section). If there are other parent sections of the current section, then they are displayed as "Related Sections".