We officially launched a new version of our website for kb.com which is focused on the true core of any company, the people. Sure we have the typical statements about what we do and a portfolio of the work we’ve done, but the bulk of the site is a profile for every employee, here’s mine.  Our team here worked very, very hard to get this up and running.  The whole site is built on MODx as a CMS for the primary reason that it easily allows for pages to be content managed by anyone and rendered as XML, and that it has an extremely easy interface to hand code PHP (with what they call snippets) tp allow for all sorts of dynamic functionality from the server side.  The front end is built with Adobe Flex in combination with jQuery which handles deep-linking, proper autosizing of the page, loading the SWF and all of the tracking.

The site required a lot of digging into MODx to filter and deliver all of the data to Flex.  I made a number of snippets and modified quite a few, especially ListIndexer, to provide XML output that drove the front-end.  In order to populate the site, I also made a number of custom SQL scripts (converted via Regular Expressions from an Excel document) that pushed content into many of the tables.  The hardest part here was populating all of the template variables; which required figuring out the variable mappings.  In the end the site has 6 sitemap files totalling in 400+ URLs all of which are deep-linkable.

I don’t think this site could have been put together without MODx, no other decent (and free opensource) CMS has the capabilites to handle XML output and simple server side scripting access.

The team that helped bring this site together is Ro Pulliam (an amazing Flex freelancer), Anthony Cafaro, Tara Milone, Megan O’Connor, Heather Martin, and Jason McKim.