Tell us about yourself
Mosman is an historic harbour side area of 8.7 square kilometres just north of the Sydney CBD. Mosman Council administers and services this area for the benefit of residents, businesses and visitors.
Mosman Council’s website aims to provide accurate, comprehensive and timely information on Mosman Council’s activities and services as well as enabling online access to Council resources and facilitating communication online between Council and its constituents.
The visual design was commissioned from a leading Australian web standards developer (and designer!) after an information architecture had been developed.
Four templates for the static pages – Home, Section, Subsection and Individual Page – were supplied.
Team Textpattern provided the nested section functionality plus a great deal of assistance with server-specific issues and other site-specific requirements.
The HTML/CSS was done inhouse, as well as content migration and some additional templates for News and Event sections.
Why did you choose Textpattern for this site?
After evaluating many proprietary and open-sources Content Management Systems, we decided to trial Textpattern on a satellite site for the Mosman Festival in 2005.
We then used it for two local history projects (Mosman Memories of Your Street and Mosman Voices) as well as two Council subject-specific sites (Media Centre and LEP Review websites).
We found it lightweight and fast to deploy, which is plus with a web team of one.
Textpattern was chosen because of its cost, maturity and stability, the excellent community that exists around the tool, the quality of developers available for custom work, and the non-proprietary nature of its data storage.
Textpattern provided just enough for our needs. We did not require extensive interaction with back-end systems, nor sophisticated multi-author roles and versioning.
Are you using any plugins?
There are 19 plugins installed and active. Some to assist with content input (file and image popper), some with development & backups (like mcw_templates), others with including external content (simplepie and vdh_flickr).
Most important are probably zem_event (which handles events, meetings, employment ads and more) and chh_if_data (ubiquitous).
Visit Mosman Library.
