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About this site

This site is based in large part on the Maryland Wing, Civil Air Patrol website, and technology designed and developed by Lt Col Christian Ready, Maryland Wing Webmaster. Development of the core processes behind this web site and its technology for this site was provided thanks to the dedicated efforts of many current and former members of the Maryland Wing. North Carolina Wing specific functionality, including the core “Paperless Wing” was designed, developed and implemented by Lt Col David Crawford, North Carolina Wing, with code contributed by Major Mark Kunkowski of Virginia Wing and Major Jay Lindler of South Carolina Wing.

About the “look and feel”

As the official auxiliary of the United States Air Force, the site was designed to be visually “connected” to the Air Force’s web site, but have a distinctly North Carolina Wing identity and character. The color palette was taken from the seal of the North Carolina Wing Civil Air Patrol and the United States Air Force. The typeface of the site is set in Arial to give the site a clean, military appearance.

Structure

The site is authored to the XHTML 1.0 Strict specification as set forth by the World Wide Web Consortium. The presentation layer is controlled with Cascading Style Sheets. The pop-up player on the radio page is a Flash SWF file which reads data from an XML file. JavaScript is used to validate form data entry, control text size, and power a WYSIWYG editor to allow staff members to edit content in various sections of the site.

Server-side technology and architecture

The site was written in ColdFusion MX 7 using the Model-View-Controller architecture in the Fusebox 5.x application framework. All site content and user information is stored in a SQL database.

Syndication feeds

RSS/XML feeds are provided for the news releases. Content for the feeds is managed through a content management system, allowing site authors to update feeds without having to know XML or the RSS specification.

Content Management

A content management system was developed to allow members with specific permission levels to create, edit, and delete all of the pages, news releases, radio program episodes, external links, and calendar events. In short, all information presented on this site is provided directly to you by the knowledgeable staff officers themselves. Please contact these staff members directly if you have questions about the content of the page you are viewing.

Third Party Applications

Some of the functionality of this site is powered by third party solutions - some are commercial, some are open-source. The site uses the Macromedia ColdFusion MX 7 server to dynamically generate pages and content. The search engine is powered by the Verity search server, which is OEM’d into Macromedia ColdFusion. FCKEditor is an open-source WYSIWYG XHTML editor which is used as part of the content management system. The pop-up music player for the radio program is the open-source XSPF player.

Tools

A variety of tools were used to produce this web site:

Disclaimer

LINKS OR REFERENCES TO INDIVIDUALS OR COMPANIES DOES NOT CONSTITUTE AN ENDORSEMENT OF ANY INFORMATION, PRODUCT OR SERVICE YOU MAY RECEIVE FROM SUCH SOURCES.

This notice is required by CAP Regulation 110-1

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