Innovative website design and application development
Incorporated in 1912, the City of El Cajon lies in eastern San Diego County. Covering just over 14 square miles of land and with a population just over 95,000, the City of El Cajon has weathered spurts of significant growth in its 100 year history. Guided by a prudent and fiscally responsible civic leadership, the city has weathered its rapid growth periods with a balanced economy and a governmental structure which offers full municipal services.
The City of El Cajon approached Module Media in 2006, initially as a general consultant to aide in the transition from its previous web development firm. Our initial role was simply to replace a Flash-based navigation menu to one that employed standards compliant technologies such as CSS and JavaScript. As we began work on the project, it became evident that much more work was needed on a website and custom CMS that had seen little to no upgrade in over a decade. On the front-end, the site used deprecated forms of structure, employed an inaccessible Flash-based navigation menu, traditional tables were used to organize the site, and files/folders throughout the site contained megabytes of content that were no longer being used. On the back-end, dynamic portions of the site were built using classic ASP, the database used to store the content was an antiquated version of SQL Server in SQL Server 7, and the website was being hosted by an outside vendor on a Windows NT 4 server runnin IIS 4.
Beyond the technical challenges of the project, SQL injection attacks were common and occurred weekly. Since most of the passwords were stored in clear text in the database, retrieving those passwords by a trained hacker was effortless. The CMS could easily be comprised to inject harmful JavaScript code in the database that would inevitably install Trojan horses on an unsuspecting computer.
Needless to say, major upgrades were needed. Initially, Module Media focused on cleaning up files and folders that were no longer being used. Server-side scripts that were backups, copies, or were simply no longer needed were removed as to eliminate a potential “back door” to the new database. Additionally, the inaccessible Flash-based navigation menu was replaced by one that employed the use of standard web technologies such as CSS and JavaScript. While the website design and custom CMS remain, everything was completely and successfully migrated to a new web hosting provider running Windows Server 2003 and IIS 7. For the time being, classic ASP is still being used to drive the backend CMS however the database was successfully migrated over to SQL Server 2005. Unused database tables were removed and user’s passwords were encrypted to prevent compromise of user credentials. A custom sewer bill payment system along with SSL certificates were also successfully migrated over with little-to-no impact to the general population.
While work still remains including a redesign of the public-facing website as well as rebuilding their CMS using newest generation technologies, the City of El Cajon and their IT staff can feel confident in knowing that the foundation of their website and custom CMS are in line with current technologies.
