The RFU made a decision after the success in the 2003 World Cup to change the structure of the RFU website in its entirety. The brief was to segregate the growing expanse of content into different sites leaving RFU.com as a portal site to those within.

Community Rugby is the repository for information and news on coaching and refereeing for all levels of the game. Supporting Community Rugby are Objective Internet's Serendipity for CMS and ActivityForum for community management that supports the clubs.

Community Rugby content from the main site is now housed in its own purpose built site specially for the rugby community. There was once a vast wealth of material, documents and pages on the RFU site on this subject and together with the masses of information from other areas, finding it was pretty hard. Now it has its own home the users can go to the dedicated site and easily find the information they want.

Although the site appears to the naked eye of being a complete departure from the RFU site, Objective Internet, with the help of Adobe Coldfusion as the development platform retained dynamic links to the main portal for such features as user accounts and news. Logging into the main RFU site will also leave you logged in when you visit Community Rugby. Content Managers can publish a news item on the RFU site and also cross publish it to the dedicated Community Rugby page at the same time, via Objective Internet's Serendipity content management system.

The RFU and the users both reap the rewards from this style of deployment. The users enjoy ease of access to the specific Community Rugby content and the RFU can cross populate with relevant content to each of the sites under the RFU umbrella. Therefore relieving the associated headaches with multiple site management. Everything, including forums, blogs, downloads and page content is controlled from a centralised console but the user has a better online experience.

Other RFU sites that have made the departure into stand alone territory are England Rugby and Twickenham Experience.

www.community-rugby.com