by
FCC Author

The current FCC.gov has hundreds of thousands of pages, hidden across a myriad of different directories and subdomains. When thinking about how we wanted to migrate content over to the new FCC.gov, we had to find a way to organize these pages into categories based on a number of different factors. No existing product fit our needs so we made our own and called it “DeveloperView.”

DeveloperView is an open source PHP/MySQL project designed to allow government agencies and other organizations, by aggregating otherwise distributed institutional knowledge, to overlay a third dimension of information over a web page and provide website stakeholders the ability to view, organize, and collaborate in the management of site content. When used in conjunction with our open source website crawler, it can provide complete statistics on tag usage and progress to a goal of tagging every page.

Here at the FCC, we’ve had each office and bureau use DeveloperView to categorize their pages into four main tags: archive, rewrite, consumer, and industry. We are now using these tags to import and classify pages into the new FCC.gov.

We’ve found DeveloperView useful in the redesign project and want to share it with any organization redesigning their website. The source code is released under the GNU General Public License and our current release is available on GitHub. Right now the project takes a bit of knowledge of PHP and MySQL to set up but we are planning to release a version of DeveloperView that runs right out of the box on a flash drive.

We encourage you to give the tool a try or if you are familiar with PHP, invite you to contribute back to the project itself.