fraunhofer.de goes live June 23rd with Tridion

In case you’re wondering what it is I do everyday when i go to work this post should give you an example.

Yesterday the German prime minister inaugurated the new site of the Fraunhofer Institution, perhaps some of you will recognize the name as the MP3 format was invented by this institution.

This research institution was formed 60 years ago and is focused mainly on applied research which means they work on practical and useful applications of science such as advancing portable devices technology, improving biological processes for medicine manufacturing and more.

The new site’s homepage:

Fraunhofer Homepage

Fraunhofer, a long time Tridion customer has hired Tridion’s Professional Services to implement their new site in their new environment running Tridion’s R5.3 (SP1).

The implementation included modular templating which is a relatively new way of creating templates to publish content to the web using the Tridion platform.

My role in this project was as part of a team of Tridion consultants building the functionality needed to create the site by content editors who are not technically oriented (which is of course the essence of what Tridion does).
I was also in charge of making many decisions in regards to the technical implementation, an example of this was that I,  seeing the complexity of the content definition required by the customer, made the decision to use the “XSLT Mediator” (which i helped develop and currently maintain as a sort of an “add-on” to Tridion). The Mediator allowed us to create XSLT templates in combination with .NET templates to achieve the best solution for this specific implementation.

I created many of these XSLT Templates and even created some of the front-end functionality  (in JAVA no less),  so the menus and breadcrumb are dynamically loaded with code i wrote

Although we were on a very tight schedule with a short deadline we managed to produce a solution the customer was happy with which is a great satisfaction for me personally.