The CNIL renewed its confidence in Typo3

The CNIL is an independent body responsible for ensuring regulations regarding human identities, privacy and freedom are adhered to in the digital world. The importance of CNIL to the French landscape at a time when the digital economy is developing, is key and must be backed by solid assets including the communication tools that are in place. As such, the redesign of the website and its organisation must meet CNIL's requirements. The redesign of this site required the implementation of innovative web communication tools in line with the times. It was about allowing the user to:

• Provide comprehensive, clear, focussed and themed information so that all information could be displayed on one page.
• By relying on themed features, each user can identify relevant information simplifying the search process.
• Simple, logical and multi-directional navigation for easily browsing between sections

"Smile has been working with the CNIL for a few years. This partnership began in 2003: at the time we developed the organisation's website with Typo3. Smile then continued the partnership by carrying out developments and through the TMA. Smile was therefore proud to see CNIL renew its confidence in us by calling on our Interactive Agency to redesign the site's graphics, Smile consulting for creating the specifications and Smile's engineers to develop the project using the CMS Typo3 in March 2009.", explains Y. Laffiché, commercial manager for the project.

A clear and structured categorisation system

. Constantly changing due to the continual development of the digital economy, the CNIL launched an audit of its data structure that will lead to the creation of a thesaurus. Smile worked with a team of CNIL's internal auditors to change these new website standards in order to select the data for publication and the categorisation for implementation. "We could not use the same categorisation as it would have been too dense for the web. We therefore came up with an architecture together covering all data for publication whilst respecting the constraints or reading web content,"explained M. Alimi, CNIL's project manager. The notion of themes is an important part of the categorisation structure. In order to handle this concept, Smile developed an add in for extending the category management of Typo3's standard module " tt_news" to all website content. There were four major categories:

• Content type: News; Guidelines; File sheets; Faq ; Proceedings; Pages
• Profile
• Technologies
• Themes

These categories were sub-divided into 2 levels. They could then be added, changed or deleted by CNIL's webmaster to track and develop the creation of new themes. These categories enable the site to display themed information on the front end and to feed the keyword cloud. Smile used the new Flexform technology provided by Typo3 for managing structured content. This prevents data having to be stored in a database which is an altogether lighter solution.

Your mail ready for printing

Smile developed a module for generating mail entitled "Mail for taking action." This plug in creates structured mail models for complaining in situations where Internet users rights have been violated. The user simply selects the subject of their mail and fills in fields on the form. The module generates the letter in PDF format. The user then simply has to add their supporting documents. From the reporting side of things, a help module for reporting existing files was improved. Based on the same concept, with just a few clicks the declaration can be submitted to the CNIL. Finally the site also provides a legal information generator that the file manager must make available to people concerned by the information held on it so that they can fully exercise their rights.

Accessibility of public sector sites

As a public organisation, the CNIL site must have excellent accessibility. Smile therefore adapted certain CSS to give users the option to choose between normal or accessible mode, These style sheets eradicate problems related to the contrasting colours of graphics by offering a black and white version of the site whilst conserving the structure and graphics. Each section has an accessible slide show developed by the CNIL. In the back office, an inline field in Ajax enables administrators to create new tabs with just a few clicks.

Detailled search engine

The search engine developed enables users to refine searches by selecting the type of content they want to search. Users can therefore choose to search for news, guidelines or an article. Taking into account the site's rich content, this refinement strategy saves time and is more effective for the user.

Interact with web 2.0

Many social interaction modules exist as plug ins for Typo3. The website www.cnil.fr has used a number of these such as:

• Sending to a friend: a form that enables users to simply and easily share information collected with a friend.
• Giving an opinion on an article: the add in rating customised to suit CNIL's graphical guidelines, enables users to vote on the news, guidelines or editorial pages. Users can award 1 to 5 stars. The vote is anonymous, a cookie prevents users from voting more than once on any give article.
• Contact forms: Typo3 provides all the features necessary to create comprehensive forms from the addition of standard fields to the integration of a captcha system. Some services (matching, communication, webmaster) have a contact form with varying fields depending on the needs of different departments. Fields that are filled in on the form are sent by email to specific addresses. For this feature, the plug in "powermail" was adapted to suit CNIL's visual identity.