Hebrew Senior Life

The Hebrew Senior Life was an intranet build-out for a nursing home with several locations. The requirements were to implement it using Sitecore with support of a number of modules such as the Web Forms For Marketers, the Extranet module, Calendar module and several custom faceted Lucene Search indexes. The LDAP part of the extranet was going to be built out by someone else so I could focus on the design of the CMS system and content structure.

The intranet would support a number of locations and one of the challenges was building a flexible system that allowed the content editors to specify content by location. Originally I thought that I would be able to leverage the DMS to allow users to set rules for the display of content for a given location but that turned out to be far more work than just providing a few buckets where they could select the location that the content should show up for and then managing the display logic in a code. As much as I like the new features in Sitecore, sometimes there's no substitute for just plain old simple content structures.

With the modules, I've had experience with most, so that was beneficial but I had to become a quick expert on the forms and calendar modules which I haven't used before. Luckily they were pretty easy to use out of the box. I did have to skin the design for any combination of form elements and develop a strategy to make the forms easy to configure for a content editor but that's all part of what I do well. 

One of the most interesting features was on saving user specific information to support a favorites page. I had to do some research and in one of the many Sitecore cookbooks found a way to store custom user properties. I used that to store a delimited list of page ID's and used that to determine if the page you were on was a favorite and also to display the list of favorites on it's own page.