Maasmechelen

The Belgian branch of Green Valley BV contracted Redwerk to customize its main product, the CMS, for the town of Maasmechelen in Belgium. They provided Web page designs approved by the town’s local authorities’ employees, as well as the website’s functional requirements.

Additionally, a new module had to be developed for the CMS product. It had to allow citizens and civil servants to make online listings or reservations for events. An event can be anything—a book, a car, a meeting room, officer appointments and more.

The reservation process had to be represented visually with a calendar displaying occupied and free time slots marked by different colors. Monthly, weekly and daily views had to be available. To authenticate users, the module had to be user profile-aware and be available on both the intranet (for civil employees only) and the Internet sites (for citizens).

Having worked side-by-side with Green Valley’s core CMS developers before, the Redwerk team easily customized it to the town of Maasmechelen’s needs and requirements. Photoshop mockups were created. Templates were put in their places. JavaScript programming was performed.

We used CMS customization best practices to make sure each updatable section, from news, events and videos to contact numbers, is easily maintainable post launch. These practices were partially taken from Green Valley’s partnerships with other localities in the Netherlands and Belgium.

The reservations module used the CMS document tree as its main data storage. On the client-side, we implemented a dynamic AJAX behavior for a smooth user experience without multiple page reloads.