EUROPLANE work components

Small airports Content Management System (CMS)

Small airports need a good website to communicate their strengths and attract customers. However, maintaining an effective online presence is often a challenge:

• Web design skills are limited, sites are often very basic
• Resources may be insufficient to create a professional site
• Content updating is cumbersome and often requires an external designer
• Each web site stands for itself, network effects and synergies are difficult to realise

A CMS for small airports

The EUROPLANE project decided to support small airports by developing a free online Content Management System (CMS) that can be re-used by other small airports. An initial implementation has been carried out for the Airport Eberswalde-Finow.

The CMS was designed by BMT Transport Solutions GmbH and implemented by beans-n-bites, using their prorietrary CMS 'hugo' in a special edition available free of charge under a GNU licence (download below).

The CMS allows small airports to use a normal web browser to edit and post facts about itself, but also about the surrounding region. It makes it very easy to post news items, the headlines of which are automatically included on the start page.

When putting to use the free CMS, airports can start out from a default site structure suitable for most small airports. Besides news, the default site structure includes flight and landside services, information on the region, and airman's info, a section which provides technical information on the respective airport as well as flight safety (NOTAM) and weather (METAR) requests. Users are free to create any number of pages within sections, or to extend or modify the structure itself.

The CMS supports 5 basic templates for different content types. The server side application can be downloaded free of charge by airports. Hosting requirements are (PHP 5, MySQL, and the GDLib library), and are easily met by many webspace providers at entry level costs.

The CMS supports the posting of news that can be syndicated by other sites, images in preview and full size, and full text search.

The benefits of quality online information

Through a professional web site, small airports can better reach their customers, and show their strengths and business goals:

• Become a logistics hub. Airports with adjacent real estate may want to attract companies that rely on air services as part of their logisitics strategy.
• Attract business aviation. Airports may want to attract business aviation, offering quick and flexible services to locations unavailable via the scheduled services.
• Attract low-cost airlines. Some small airports in the vicinity of cities may advertise themselves as destination for low-cost carriers.
• Support general aviation needs. Private pilots need information on airports and airfields in their traffic planning, such as opening hours, aircraft parking, landing charges, fuel availability, or accommodation options. Last not least, they may want to know what attractions exist in the airport’s vicinity to explore.

The free hugo Small Airports Special Edition for download

Below, you find the hugo Small Airports Special Edition, a Website Content Management System (CMS) for download. The software is licensed under the Gnu General Public License.

• hugo Small Airports Special Edition [zip file, 2.78 MB]
• ReadMe (English)—System requirements and instructions for installation (in English)
• ReadMe (German)—Systemvoraussetzungen und Installationshinweise (auf Deutsch)

For further information or support, contact Detlev Fischer at BMT Transport Solutions GmbH (df [ at ] bmt-ts.com)

Last update: 15 January 2008