On March 24th, the new portal of Government of Paraná went live. This new communication tool was presented at the weekly meeting of the School of Government by the President of the Company Informática do Paraná (Celepar), Mr. Vanderlei Iensen.
Among the main features of the new website is the color-based visual model to differentiate between the content for its relevance and ease of maintenance, and statewide access to government services.
The portal is divided into five major areas, which are the points of entry for other information:
• list of services available to citizens,
• services and information for the business environment,
• information about Paraná,
• government information, and
• news,
all divided by tabs and color specific.
According to Mr. Iensen, the focus of the portal is to provide information to Parana's citizen, with the ranking of information in order to organize the content and ensure the integrity and robustness of published data. The goal is to maintain the distribution of content based on the national standard for electronic government (e-gov).
During the meeting on March 24th, 2009, Paraná's Governor Roberto Requiao signed a decree establishing rules and guidelines for construction and maintenance of sites and portals on the Internet by the departments of Parana's government. Under the decree, it is the responsibility of the Secretariat of Social Communication using Celepar's guidelines and standards. Celepar is also responsible for the construction of all government sites and for running the infrastructure.
With an average of 2.5 million accesses per month, the domain http://pr.gov.br contains over 400 sites and portals with over three thousand links. All of them are developed using Open Source software, technology that requires no payment of royalties and fees to use it, which saves taxpayer money.
The basis for all Websites of Parana's Government is XOOPS (eXtended Object Oriented Portal System, a web application platform written in PHP for the MySQL database. Its object orientation makes it an ideal tool for developing small or large community websites, intra company and corporate portals, weblogs and much more.
Around 2004, 100% of existing sites in pr.gov.br (site of the Government of Paraná) were made in pure HTML technology, with few and simple tools for updating the end user (editor, news manager and banners).
After the internal testing of XOOPS, the first site to launch using this technology was the News Agency in early 2005.
From that point on, it was a race to convert all government sites to XOOPS. Slowly at first, with few sites per month, but growing rapidly, most sites have been converted to XOOPS in 2007.
Today, the number of sites still in HTML is just residual, while the rest of over 400 Websites is developed with XOOPS (you can see the portfolio of the Government of Paraná Websites powered by XOOPS).
About XOOPS: Founded in 2002 by group of international software developers, XOOPS quickly become one of world’s leading Open Source Content Management Systems (CMS). Known and loved for its ease of use and countless powerful modules, XOOPS received numerous International Awards and Recognitions, among them: the First Runner-Up in the SourceForge 2006 Community Choice Awards in the Development category, 5 Stars from Germany's Chip Magazine, Top 3 content management system from Adobe Edge Magazine, one of top Open Source CMS for Medical Professionals by ONDD. It was also the finalist of 2008 Source Forge Community Awards, and 2008 CMS Awards by Packt Publishing. In January 2009 it received the 2008 China Open Source Software Contest Award. XOOPS is the most active and downloaded CMS project on www.SourceForge.net
More info at: http://www.xoops.org