The Illinois State Police Heritage Foundation (ISPHF) website was completely redesigned from the ground up. In addition to the redesign, ISPHF was looking for five key aspects in the new website. They wanted to maintain their own content, incorporate an online store, accept donations, manage events, and have the website responsive so it looks nice on phones and tablets. The content management system (CMS) concrete5 is easily extensible and fulfills all of the needs of ISPHF.

ISPHF has over 50 products they need to manage on the online store. The E-Commerce add-on created by the core developers of concrete5 allows ISPHF to do this. The add-on is fully customizable to match the look and feel of the rest of the ISPHF website. ISPHF has the options to create/update/delete products, add images, update shipping costs, and anything else needed in an online store. The E-Commerce feature also allows ISPHF to accept donations through the website. In addition, we created a custom dashboard page for ISPHF to manage their events through the website. The custom dashboard page allows ISPHF to easily enter the details, description, and attachments for an event, which is then automatically populated on the events page of the website.

Although the concrete5 CMS is very extensible, it has a lot of nice built-in features. One of the features concrete5 offers that ISPHF likes is the in-context editing. Rather than going to an admin page on the website to update content, concrete5 allows ISPHF to update the content directly on the page they want changed. Another useful feature is the form block that emails ISPHF administrators the results of contact us form submissions. If they don’t want the results emailed to them, there is also a page on the admin side of the website to view all form submissions. The File Manager is another useful tool that is built in to concrete5. The File Manager is where ISPHF uploads the product images, attachments for events, and other documents/images on the web site.