Rapid website development for the City of Amsterdam

In just 5 days, the openstad team delivered for the City of Amsterdam a new website dedicated to Amsterdam's response to the Coronavirus pandemic.

Last year, the openstad (open city) team had been working on a multisite version of ApostropheCMS for the benefit of the City of Amsterdam. The primary purpose of these sites are to support digital democracy and community participation. Individuals can submit and review neighborhood project proposals, and subsequently vote on submissions to direct municipal budget allocations.

With this experience already in the toolkit, the openstad team was ready to take on an emergent request from the Mayor. The request was to launch a new website dedicated to Amsterdam's response to the Coronavirus pandemic. Aligned with governmental requirements, an open-source code base would need to be selected to support the initiative. They would also need a solution that was highly customizable and quick to develop. By leveraging ApostropheCMS they were able to take the site from idea to delivery in just 5 days.

"With a team of 3 to 4 we can do a lot, over 20 to 30 sites per year, thanks to Apostrophe." Tosh Koevoets, Full-Stack developer with openstad at City of Amsterdam 
 

The website serves as the platform for Amsterdam initiatives related to and resulting from COVID-19. The need required more than a few landing pages or redirects. The platform called for a simple navigation but with dynamic functionality including single user logins, blog features, filtered search results, video gallery, among others. Knowing that Apostrophe could facilitate these requirements, both through its core features and variety of open-source extensions, while being packaged in a flexible and easy to develop full-stack JS package, the decision was clear. A week after inception, the high quality site was delivered to the City of Amsterdam and it has been widely visited by individuals, promoters and volunteers looking to support each other and the emerging initiatives that have grown as a result in the fight against the Coronavirus.

As detailed on the site, "Wij Amsterdam is for all Amsterdammers who help each other during the corona crisis. Amsterdammers with great initiatives, Amsterdammers who like to contribute, and Amsterdammers who are looking for help. They can find each other on this platform. Together we strengthen each other!" (translated)

To check out the website and learn more about the initiative platform visit https://wijamsterdam.nl/.