WIMP 2.0 | Website Information Management Platform

The core concept of WIMP was kept to carry out its basic intended functions, which was website management. However, there was no need to rely on any CMS since WIMP was able to provide the same services or webpage management, and furthermore customized to fill the gaps the other CMS’s did not provide. WIMP 2.0, now works simultaneously with a REST API also developed by Techtress Design Studio, which returns the data stored in the WIMP database in JSON format, to view data dynamically on the website.

WIMP is a customized Web-based Information Management Platform as its name suggests. It’s framework comprises of a combination of HTML, PHP, CSS, JavaScript and jQuery. WIMP was developed by Shanika Matura founder of Techtress Design Studio, in September 2016. The application was presented to the National Meteorological Service of Belize (NMS as the initial solution to its website’s maintenance. WIMP was used to replace Joomla which was the original platform in with the company’s website was built on. The weather forecasters, having no technical expertise, would have to edit articles (or site pages), to update their periodical forecasts, as much as 3 times daily on the website. Often times, this method of updating the website resulted in breaking the website’s template.

WIMP was primarily customized to post weather forecasts to the NMS’s website. A few forms were created, to enter the forecast data; and once this data was stored, the data would then be sent to the website’s hosting server as JSON files which were then read through JavaScript and visualized on the website. This completely eliminated the templating issue. Thereafter, WIMP was seen to be able to accomplish much more than it was initially built for. Modules were added to manage users and set user roles so the application can be used by different sections of the department. A system configuration module was also added to set various system variables that exist throughout the application. WIMP was further developed to add modules to send weather alerts to the NMS’s website. An algorithm was setup in the background to connect WIMP to the NMS’s Climate Database Management System (HydrometDB) to use the data entered by the weather observers to compute the hourly weather condition to be displayed on the NMS’s website’s front page. These hourly automated processes would lessen non-technical user interaction with the website’s template files.

This version of WIMP was used for approximately one year, when Matura realized that WIMP could be used as the exclusive CMS for the NMS’s website content. As a result, WIMP 2.0 was born, as a complete solution to website management.