I’m very happy to announce that the new web site for Hoyt Arboretum has launched! We have been working on this project for several months. In addition to a design that I am personally very proud of, I’m also very happy to report that this has been a 100% volunteer effort.
I want to say a special thanks to Jordan Lev, John McBride, Thai Bui and Franz Maruna for their hours of volunteer time or donations. You can learn more about the web team here.
This custom-designed web site uses concrete5 for its framework, an open source CMS created right here in Portland.
I took on this project after visiting the arboretum many months ago and noticing that they needed a volunteer web master. As I enjoyed the arboretum I volunteered to help out. Little did I know what I was getting myself into!
Hoyt’s old website used Plone for their content management system (CMS). Plone runs on Zope & Python and the learning curve is pretty much vertical. As my background was in WordPress or Joomla, over time it became clear that due to the steep learning curve and the lack of Plone developers in Portland, that we needed to switch to a PHP-based CMS.
After some heated debate amongst the local community, I settled on concrete5. It looked dead easy to use and the executive staff at Hoyt loved that it was developed in Portland. This is my first site in this CMS and I’ve been so impressed with it that my next web site is going to be concrete5 also.
I couldn’t have done this without the help of those mentioned above, so again, Thank You!