bespoke

Our development expertise has fostered numerous in-house innovations, many of which have been integrated as evolutions of our Context CMS. Selected examples as follows:

Using Context, a given site can support multi-lingual versions. To support the system's multi-lingual capabilities, the 'Site labels' section of the CMS provides the ability to change any label included on the website, from the breadcrumb label/text 'You are in' to form buttons and text used in emails sent as part of newsletter subscription.

Context can be easily integrated with a range of transactional services. For example, our Context solution for Chichester Council supports a range of public facing transactional services: Chichester council online payments.

We've recently implemented a comprehensive RSS solution for HERO's suite of websites. HERO RSS.

Our CMS also includes a very user friendly form builder wizard. This allows CMS users to construct custom forms within a simple interface; they can specify the data to be collected, and the destination source of the form content 'on submit'. This provides a great deal of flexibility in creating 'contact us' forms, website feedback forms etc.

We have extensive experience of creating directory interfaces that allow for simple and advanced search options. For examples of this functionality in action, please refer to: Parliament publications search.

We've developed a number of online calculator tools using a ColdFusion custom tag. Custom tags provide the site and CMS with great flexibility, in that the functionality can be extended as the requirements of the site evolve. A simple example can be seen on the website we developed for Aimhigher, which features a student cost of living calculator: Cost of living calculator.

Epic has begun to work more and more in the area of web services. For the most part, these have used WSDL to either create or consume web services. Some recent examples include integrating a post code search for the HERO website (Post code search) and a careers profile search for the Aimhigher website ( Careers profile search). In both cases, Epic used ColdFusion Components (CFCs) to query and cache data provided by 3rd party web services. ColdFusion MX has the ability to make any data available as a WSDL web service, but we also could provide other methods for 3rd parties to query the CLS directory, such as XML feeds or PHP scripts.