Coding for community – team trenton business portal

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Trenton Business HubAllain Dollete

+Municipal Need

Municipality Trenton, NJ (Mercer)

Need Statement The City does not currently have a portal to provide

information to people who are looking to open businesses or develop property. This puts Trenton at a disadvantage compared to other communities who provide easy to access business and development related information. Providing a business and developer portal will make the City more helpful to the business and developer community, help businesses and developments start faster, and help reduce the number of failed businesses and development.

+Team’s Solution

Create a web application with a content management system where Trenton Officials can post documents seamlessly for potential entrepreneurs to view without having to change the code base.

+How The Solution Works

How it works Officials can login and do the following

Create Users with certain privileges Update Navigation Bar Create new pages/articles with preset layouts Ability to manipulate the look and feel of the page/article within

the text editor, and embed photos and videos Add news clippings Change the order of pages/article/clippings where needed Uses Amazon Web Services S3 to store media

Application: https://trentonbusinesshub.herokuapp.com/

GitHub: https://github.com/jdollete/trenton-business-portal

+Impact

Short-Term Easier access to information for potential entrepreneurs,

which could lead to having their businesses open faster

Long-Term Influence more business to open in the city of Trenton, NJ

+Originality

The most popular Content Management System that I have seen used is WordPress with PHP as part their main tech stack, I have decided to use a Ruby on Rails application that uses Camaleon CMS. With that I created a new theme that was configured and customized to fit the specific needs as requested by the project stakeholders.

Third Party Products Camaleon Content Management System Partially designed using a layout from W3Layouts

+Scalability

The code base was developed so any community that wishes to use this business portal could download and deploy onto a hosting site and use it right away. For now they would have to change the application header title until I implement it onto the CMS. The community would also need a hosting platform for their media (i.e. Amazon Web Services S3). Anyone with Ruby on Rails experience would be able to manipulate the code base to their liking.

+Usability

Currently the application has met the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) as requested

The application is currently being populated by an official from the city of Trenton, NJ

This project will be handed over to Coding for Trenton for future implementation of requested features

As said in the waiver, I will do any maintenance work that is needed if the city decides to move forward and use this application

+Resources

Content Management System Documentation