SilverStripe Platform provides powerful solutions

Whitireia and WelTec are two education providers who recently aligned to deliver creative programmes from a central hub in Wellington, called Te Auaha. The partnership aims to give both entities and their students more value through shared resources and knowledge collaboration.

Whitireia, WelTec, and Te Auaha all have separate websites that provide detailed course information and enrolment processes for current and prospective students. SilverStripe worked alongside Whitireia and WelTec to deliver three easily maintainable websites that delivered the best user experience to the students.

Systems that needed modernising

Whitireia and WelTech were both operating separately online with some outdated content management systems (CMSs), poor UX and disparate websites and subsites. Staff had to manually update course information in several places, with Whitireia students having no access to online enrolment. The goal was to streamline processes and make the platforms more user friendly, for both staff and students.

The education providers’ leadership teams recognised the need for an update and refresh of the websites and CMSs. There was a need for a more integrated approach and a modern web platform to support common marketing goals and communications across the strategic partnership. They would need a platform with the flexibility to enable some of the choices they were likely to make in the future.

Enter SilverStripe Platform

The SilverStripe CMS is a very powerful platform. Its modern framework, ample local support, and high level of interoperability with other tools we wanted to use, gave us the confidence that SilverStripe would give Whitireia and WelTec the flexibility they needed.

– Phil Guerin, Project Advisor

SilverStripe Platform allows one stack to hold multiple sites and subsites for an organisation, making it the ideal solution for the multi-organisational partnership.

The education providers utilised SilverStripe’s design talent, solution architects, workshop facilitators, programme supporters, developers, and delivery team to ensure the multi-faceted projects were completed successfully.

The vision of the subsite project was broken up into three main stages.

1. The initial stage involved SilverStripe delivering end-to-end solutions for Whitireia and Te Auaha, including discovery, design, and implementation.

2. The second stage was to move WelTec’s oldest website to the platform, which went live just before Christmas 2017.

3. The final stage involves integrating a newer WelTec site, due to be completed in 2018.

SilverStripe collaborated with the institutions to implement an automated enrolment process through bespoke form frontend, leveraging the SilverStripe Platform services of queued jobs, logging, SFTP, and environment configuration. SilverStripe designers were also able to maintain the individuality of the branding for each site.

Giving institutes more value

With one content management system, one platform, and common page templates, managing all three sites is easy. It provides better value and a more in-depth range of skills while using less people to do the job.

The new platform gives the ability to showcase their partnership, while still expressing their individual brand identities. The CMS is fluid, empowering the team to update imagery, videos, course information and other content, which keeps the websites looking fresh and relevant. The team can now cross-publish information, and it goes to all three of the sites!

The flexibility of the CMS enables it to be potentially managed by a common digital team across the strategic partnership. Instead of having web administrators and content managers in each of Whitireia, Te Auaha, and WelTec, there can be one team that manages across all three platforms. This allows them to provide better back-up and support to each other.

SilverStripe's involvement with Whitireia and WelTec has helped the partnership to future-proof and streamline their online experience for staff and students.