IJ Solutions Develops Slamdance Film Festival Website Using OpenEdit CMS

A year-round organization dedicated to supporting emerging artists and independent films, Slamdance Inc., was in need of an interactive Content Management web application to support their online filmmaker community. With its renowned film festival as its core, Slamdance wanted to expand its ventures to include the popular Slamdance.com website, writing competitions for both screenplays and teleplays, the Anarchy Online Short Film Competition, a $99 Special short film production project, a Games competition and the newly announced Slamdance Horror Screenplay Competition, where an annual chosen script is guaranteed to be produced as a feature film.

Said Joel Halse Director of IJ Solutions, "Christopher Burkey, President of OpenEdit Inc, approached me to take part in the Slamdance project.  At the time, Slamdance had an existing site that was missing some important social and community features and functionality such as, uploading and playing of videos from within a video catalog, accepting online screenplay submissions, online voting capabilities, built in community features including blogs, news, forums with membership tracking and so forth. "

IJ Solutions, a partner of OpenEdit Inc., easily met all site requirements by assembling a first class team of experts to produce a site full of important features such as xml video cataloguing with built in video player, membership tracking for blog, news and forum interaction, online voting capabilities, and many additional features, which are built in OpenEdit.

IJ Solutions was able to partner with Slamdance to provide all software and technical support services required to implement and maintain this advanced web application built using OpenEdit - Halse continued, "We provided project management, assembled a team of experts and took responsibility to ensure the project progressed on time and identified any potential critical path issues prior to their potential disruption to the project timeline."

Building the Slamdance website using the OpenEdit Content Management Solution, IJ Solutions was able to achieve these critical goals:

• Video Catalog Management - Slamdance can upload, edit and delete from their video catalog using a web interface
• Voting - Anarchy is an ongoing short film competition where visitors can watch each video and vote on their favorite film
• Submissions - Whether video, screenplays, games, etc. - Slamdance is able to accept online submissions for all aspects of their organization online including processing of any administrator fees
• eCommerce - Online store and payment system
• Community - A newsroom, blog, and message board (interactive with Slamdance online community) with homepage highlights
• User Management - Everything from Administrator accounts, to managing the site, to guest accounts for publishing within the forums, can be controlled using the OpenEdit GUI
• Online Editing - Slamdance manages their content (text, images, links and menus, etc) via OpenEdit's online editing tools, including the Visual Editor
• Site Search - OpenEdit provides a SEO friendly site, which makes it very accessible to the major search engines. It is fully indexed locally and accessible via the OpenEdit search that is integrated into the Slamdance site

Drea Clark, Executive Director of Slamdance had this to say “OpenEdit has made the daily upkeep, revisions and content additions to our site easily manageable to even a complete novice like myself, which enables our site to be as dynamic and accessible as we’d hoped it would be.  More so, working with the talented professionals at IJ Solutions has been nothing but a pleasure; they’ve kept us on schedule, increased overall functionality, and have been consistently helpful and productive.”

"Working with Open Edit has been one of the best Slamdance experiences since we began 14 years ago. With patience and skill they have delivered a great foundation upon which we can build a virtual community for independent artists, as well as our future success."  Peter Baxter – President and Co-founder of Slamdance

Powerful and simple, OpenEdit built with Java, allows you to create fast, flexible and lightweight web sites. OpenEdit has everything you will need for Web Content Management, eCommerce, Digital Asset Management, Automatic Version Control - even through FTP uploading, Events Calendar, Dynamic Layouts, Blog Editing, Usage Tracking, Reporting, File Manager, Notification Tools and much more.

This easy, open source platform does not require a database and can be used on top of existing html, jsp or php web sites. OpenEdit President Christopher Burkey and a core team of expert Java architects have created the best way to setup and maintain your web site.


About OpenEdit Inc. (Cincinnati, Ohio)

OpenEdit is the standard in file based web content management. Based in Cincinnati, Ohio with a part time office in Chile, South America, OpenEdit has Partners and Solution Providers in North America, South America and Europe, who deploy OpenEdit enabled web sites for clients across the world.  Built in features of all OpenEdit sites include eCommerce, Blog, Content Management with online editing, Photo Gallery / Digital Asset Management, Members only section, and more. The list of technologies provided with each deployment is quite remarkable, especially considering there are no licensing fees.

Contact Information:

Julie Riley

julie@openedit.org
Telephone (937) 671-6212
www.openedit.org


About IJ Solutions (Toronto, Canada)

IJ Solutions combines powerful Internet technologies with professional design to create an Internet presence that works, the IJ Solutions community is a collection of resources to help you along the way. OpenEdit is an important part of the online services provided by IJ Solutions. Multiple sites are deployed each month using this powerful open source CMS platform.

Contact Information:

Joel Halse

joel@ijsolutions.ca
www.ijsolutions.ca


About Slamdance Inc. (Los Angeles, California)

As the preeminent festival whose sole mission is to nurture, support and showcase truly independent works, Slamdance has established a unique reputation for premiering new films by first-time writers and directors working within the creative confines of limited budgets.  Slamdance’s goal is to strengthen its year-round efforts in support of these artists and to leverage its name and reputation for the further development of other Slamdance media components.
 
Contact Information:

mail@slamdance.com
Telephone (323) 466-1786
www.slamdance.com