Second site launch for the Australian Antarctic Division

[AAD Web Team]

A couple of months ago we launched our very first PW site, which was just a very small site concerning a conference taking place in 2020.

Last week we launched our second site, and it was a much bigger project - https://jobs.antarctica.gov.au/.

Our jobs (both in Antarctica and within Australia) were previously a part of our main site at http://www.antarctica.gov.au (which is yet to be redesigned and moved into PW), so we were tasked with creating a brand new site in time for the recruitment season opening in early December. While the timeframe was tight (we only had about a month to build it), it was great to be able to work within PW, and then to introduce our editors to it. They love it in comparison to our old CMS (as do we!).

 

[Kiwi Chris]

It's great to see a government agency using Processwire. Here across the Tasman, I think Silverstripe has been mandated as the government CMS of choice which is sort of ok in some respects, but it's a lot more complex than it needs to be for many projects.

 

[AAD Web Team]

On 12/19/2018 at 11:47 AM, Kiwi Chris said:

It's great to see a government agency using Processwire. Here across the Tasman, I think Silverstripe has been mandated as the government CMS of choice which is sort of ok in some respects, but it's a lot more complex than it needs to be for many projects.

 

We were fortunately able to make the case for using something different, in order to meet our needs (the favoured CMS here is Drupal). It'd be great if we started a new trend!

[szabesz]

Hi, https://jobs.antarctica.gov.au/ is currently in the state of  "404 Not Found, nginx"

[psy]

All good now

[Margie]

Thanks to those who noticed the 404 happening on the Jobs site. I've been on my Christmas break, hence the lack of response from me on the AAD Web Team forum account. We had some wider network issues going on which were out of the web team's hands, but the right people were aware of it and worked hard to get things going again. ?

[Ivo]

Great to see a Gov Department here is Australia go away from Drupal and go with PW! Good work guys! I left Drupal in 2013 for PW and have never looked back.

[AAD Web Team]

Thanks @teppo for featuring our site in PW Weekly! ?

Now I'm back at work and am not rushing to finish a website, I thought I'd add a little extra information about the setup of the Jobs site.

For this particular site a great deal of the content already existed on our main site. It was decided that it was time the jobs had a dedicated site, so some design concepts were done by our multimedia and marketing team, and then we set about building the site in PW!

A fair bit of the content is just made up of standard web pages with a body, some images and some document uploads - but the key thing that makes this site a bit different is that the Antarctic jobs listing is seasonal. We have a big recruitment campaign at the end of each year (as we are at the time of writing), ready for the next Antarctic expedition season. The jobs are visible on the site all year round, but only open for application during the recruitment campaign.

On the surface this might seem like a simple 'on/off' scenario for all jobs, and therefore controllable with one checkbox and and if/else statement... but then there are exceptions. Not all jobs are necessarily open during the recruitment campaign (as you can see on the jobs listing currently, some say 'Apply now' and some say 'Not open': Jobs in Antarctica), and some display slightly different messages about the way you can register interest while they are closed (these exceptions are handled within functions).

We implemented a 'recruitment settings' template/page. On here there is a checkbox for stating whether the overall recruitment campaign is open or closed.

(This recruitment settings page is also a place where global job information is stored, such as the 'How to apply' section, and the General information for applications PDF that you can see on this page: job example. This means they only have to be edited in one place.)

Then on each job there is a checkbox for whether or not the job is independent of the campaign. The default value is no, but if yes is selected the job can then be marked as open or closed individually. This means editors only have to worry about marking the exceptions.

This job status functionality was in place on our old job pages on our main site, but in that CMS (Squiz Matrix) the setup was quite complex and it was something we really had to do on behalf of our recruitment staff. It has been nice to be able to give them a customised and more straightforward experience.