They are here: http://legacy.sononaco.com/howtos/
If you need to refer to the “how tos” on the previous site fear not, the old site will remain up for a bit longer while we finish this migration.
Simply visit http://legacy.sononaco.com/howtos/
All of the How-Tos are there and will be moved to the new site.
Welcome to the new Sononaco web site. We have been working on our own new site since late 2009 and it is finally ready to launch. Somewhat. There are still areas where we wish to add content but there are a slew of new additions and features.
As you know, we like to share any changes or upgrades we make to our site with all of our clients. While they may not be sexy they are still upgrades.
First, we have decided to move our entire site to a WordPress 3.0.1 blog. I thought long and hard about doing this since I subscribe to the idea that we should “eat our own dog food” and our dog food of choice is currently Zend Framework applications. However, we also subscribe to the idea that we need to use the solutions to best fit our need.
WordPress will allow staff to manage areas of the web site without reprogramming or recompiling the site. So it is my hope that you will see more activity on the site.’
So, what’s new?
A fresh, new, clean design
Designed by one of our newest team members, Franky Chung, it was our goal to build a clean, clutter-free site that better showcased our work and made navigation through the site much easier for our visitors.
Your Page
You will soon receive an e-mail containing details about how to access your new account (hint: look in the lower right of the site). Once logged in you will be able to access project pages, look up and pay invoices, see your top 5 Trac tickets, manage support tickets and chat directly with us through the web site and access the latest announcement from Sononaco.
Support Tickets
For the past two years we have been using the Trac ticketing system to handle work requests. It allows us to triage support requests to the appropriate team member. This is not going to change.
The new ticketing system will allow you to submit support requests directly through the site. If you need a new e-mail address, new domain name or any level of support you can open a support ticket directly through your page.
If you comfortable running everything through Trac, please don’t change. The new support system is offered to clients who do not use Trac.
Better Invoicing
For several months we have been researching better alternatives for our invoicing and billing. The new system is integrated directly into the site. Invoices will now be sent directly from the site and can be downloaded from a secure URL that only you have access to. Payments can still be made directly online.
Why this took so long
We’ve been busy! And busy is good. Have a look at some of the great new projects we have worked on in the past six months:
Congresswoman Donna Edwards – We just re-launched a newly designed site for Congresswoman Donna Edwards. In addition to a new design we gutted the entire back-end and set her campaign up on a brand new CMS.
APCO RETAINS – Where to begin? It took us over a year but in the end we came out with a clean, polished, interactive and easy-to-use web application. The site is restricted to APCO members only but we can tell you how awesome it is. The site is built atop the Zend Framework and uses extensive jQuery programming to provide the dynamic and interactive features of the site. With an incredible amount of data processing, on-the-fly PDF generation, Excel spreadsheet parsing and several hundred thousands lines of programming we can honestly say that this project was one of the most challenging we have ever encountered. And we loved every byte of it!
Brady Campaign – We completely ripped the javascript Mootools engine out of the site and replaced to with a rewritten and optimized jQuery library. This enabled us to create a new and interactive billboard area (the biggest thing you see on the site). Gone are the static, flat, boring billboards. Now staff can create billboards with slideshows, interactive forms, YouTube videos, Twitter feeds or their own dynamic text.
Matt Campbell for Iowa Congress – Iowa’s 5th congressional district’s competition is heating up as Matt Campbell is taking on long-term Representative Steve King. We designed, developed the CMS for and host Matt’s site.
American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network - In the last few months we have upgraded their Voter Guide for the primaries and created an internal application for tracking lobbying time (which sends a nagging reminder every week if you don’t complete your time sheets!)
Bare International – A mystery shopping company located in the Washington, DC area. Their site was in bad shape – installed atop a CMS that could not even allow administrators to add something as simple as a press release. So we built a custom CMS that allows for internationalization of all site content!
This just a small overview of what kept us busy the last six months. There has been quite a bit more work that has been done which I hope to mention in the coming months.
Now the “thank yous” -
To all of the Sononaco staff — Josh, Sumi, Leigh and Franky for all your hard work and constantly asking me when the site will be ready.
To all of our wonderful clients – if not for you we would not be hosting a site. Thank you for your continued business!
We have recently made some upgrades to the server that allow WordPress-hosted sites to use SFTP/SSH2 to manage sites.
Plain old FTP (poFTP we we call it) has been a continuous problem with timeouts and permissions issues. It simply didn’t work. Using the libssh2 package eliminates that problem and makes the plug-in installation and overall upgrade process very smooth.
If you would like your WordPress blog to have this functionality please let us know and we will migrate your site free of charge.
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Service: Sononaco 4
Outages: 0
Downtime: 0 hrs, 0 mins
Uptime: 100.00%
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(Client Server)
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Service: Sononaco 3
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Uptime: 100.00%
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mail.sononaco.com
Outages: 0
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(Client Server)
Outages: 0
Downtime: 0 hrs, 0 mins
Uptime: 100.00%
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