Convey Taxport Compass
Taxport Compass provides simplified, highly detailed, targeted non-wage tax reporting compliance research. This custom solution is one of the best resources for tax professionals.
For this project we started working on a inception phase with different prototypes because this was the best alternative for the client as they already owned a Wordpress system which was discarded later because it didn't accomplished main requirements, too many changes had been implemented with previous developments, which were not going in the right direction. That's because we finally used CakePHP framework to build the system and Bootstrap CSS Framework for HTML templates. We implemented a very responsive front end design compatible with several devices (mobiles, tablets and of course laptop and desktop).
We developed a very specific CMS to accomplish the needs for all forms and reports. It provides to the Administrator a flexible and very intuitive way to create contents (taxonomy) and specify content templates of these pages structured as "Elements", "Templates", "Taxonomies" and "Pages". The admin can use those elements in order to easily build sections associated to different states of USA, Canada and Puerto Rico. There are different admin users levels such Author, Editor or super admins.
One of the key for Administrator panel is the fluid process to update and create contents, we implemented an smart AJAX logic that allow authors, editors and super administrators perform several changes in a faster and cleaner way. The admin is also able to browse contents in the sitemap section (backend) with a tree interface with nested levels, jsTree was implemented for this purpose.
The admin section also offers the common features you can find on any other administrator panel such user management, CRUD pages and system settings. Everything uses latest plugins to improve the admin experience by creating simple forms and validations to help fulfill proper data, datepickers, WYSIWYG editor and more.
In order to make it really fast, we implemented Elasticsearch with a custom search engine inside the system to return indexed information to frontend users. The front end interfaces were thought for non-technical users so we implemented a lot of Javascript libraries such Chosen, Bootstrap Dual Listbox and custom scroll to make it really simple to use and browse.
We also implemented a script to migrate all information (thousands of contents) from the old system to this new version based on a CakePHP migrator plugin.