Page last updated on April 6, 2023 at 4:01 pm
A behind the scenes look at the technologies and techniques that are used to pull content together into a cohesive whole that serve as the City of Bloomington's website.
Bloomington's website is built atop the open source Drupal (https://www.drupal.org/) Content Management System (CMS). Drupal leverages a common LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) technology stack.
Our Drupal interface customizations are tracked as a Drupal module in Github. The look and feel of the site is controlled by this module: https://github.com/City-of-Bloomington/drupal-customizations
Integrations with other systems are managed in separate Drupal modules, including:
- Google Calendars
- onBoard
- Animal Shelter Manager
- Promt
- Directory
- CKAN Data Portal
These drupal modules are available as open source software on Github. We encourage other organizations to adapt and re-use these.
Google Calendars
As a Google Enterprise customer, City staff are familiar with Google's Calendar interface. By integrating Google Calendar data directly into the website, we find that event dates are more likely to stay up-to-date -- they're using the same system that employees are using to track the events.
We've also built a custom calendar aggregation application that will combine multiple calendars into one. This is useful in situations where many different people keep track of different types of events, for example, boards and commissions. Ultimately we want to show all of those on the City's homepage or Boards & Commissions page, but we don't want employees to have to track those in multiple calendars or systems.
onBoard
onBoard manages board and commission information.
This integration in described in greater detail here.
Animal Shelter Manager
The Animal Shelter is the most visited section of the website. In 2017 we migrated the shelter to use new software, Animal Shelter Manager. This is an open-source solution, so we were able to integrate it in with the website. This allows shelter staff to manage available animals in the system without worrying about a separate step for publishing the information on the city's site:
Promt
Promt is one of our oldest custom web applications that helps our Parks & Recreation department manage events and activities.
Originally this was used to generate the printed programs that are mailed. Since current program information is kept up to date in this system, it seemed like a natural option to integrate with the website.
Directory
The City's staff directory is available directly to the public. It is also used to dynamically keep staff listings for departments and facilities up to date.
This system is powered by our Active Directory system. Source code for the web application is available on Github
Bclear Open Data Portal
This is a separate system powered by Data & Insights. It is available at:
https://data.bloomington.in.gov