Case Study: Supervisor

Overview

Supervisor is an open source project that was originally released by Agendaless Consulting. Shortly after its release, Maintainable Software began using it on client projects and improving on it, leading us to become major contributors to the codebase. Today, Agendaless and Maintainable support and maintain the Supervisor project together.

As successive versions were released, Supervisor gained some unique capabilities that set itself apart as a platform. As users of the software began to surge, supporting them with online resources became more of an issue. Supervisor's web presense was relatively weak, making it more difficult for new users to discover the project.

Maintainable Software designed and built a new online presence for the Supervisor project, from identity through to implementation.

Features

Identity Design

We created an identity package for the software that included a new logo and tagline. We collaborated with the authors of the project to build an identity that matched Supervisor's purpose with a unique look.

Built on WordPress

We elected to build the Supervisor website on top of WordPress. This gave blogging features for free so the project could publish its news. We integrated all pages of the site into WordPress, allowing all content to be easily updated through a web interface.

Custom Theme & Plugin

We built a new WordPress theme specifically for the Supervisor website to match the identity package we created. We also made a custom plugin to provide some additional functionality unique to the website, such as automatically displaying the current version of Supervisor.

Online Manual

We built a framework for Supervisor's online manual in DocBook XML, a markup language for technical documentation. After the project contributors had written the documentation in DocBook, we built a system to automatically apply styling and integrate it seamlessly into the Supervisor website.

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