NewsForge presents a look at WebGUI, a GPL licensed program that allows for the management and creation of web content.
In 2002, Portland, Ore.'s Sunset Presbyterian Church had a 200+-page Web site that contained mainly static content about the church, its ministries, and events. While many people were using the Web site and submitting content for it, the all-volunteer team maintaining it, of which I was a member, was overworked. Half of our time was spent editing existing pages and removing old content. Everything was done by hand: creating pages, uploading them to the site via FTP, and checking them against the site's style guidelines. All new volunteers required lots of training to become fully contributing members. Our team needed to find a way to become more efficient.
The software that supported the site was old and inflexible. A mod_perl 1 plugin handled basic page templating and navigation, but it didn't easily allow interaction with other programs; thus, we could add no new features, such as discussion boards, weblogs, and photo galleries. To work with Apache 2 (and mod_perl 2), the plugin would require a complete rewrite.
In 2002, our team conducted a needs analysis to determine what we needed to take the site to the next level, including:
* Team needs: New software needed to be easy enough to use that anyone could submit content to the site. This meant removing the need for FTP and HTML training and going to a browser-based solution; however, the system still had to allow for more advanced page layouts and code, as needed. * Site needs: The team spent a lot of time pulling old material, so a content management system (CMS) that scheduled when content was available would help streamline our process. We needed to have group- and user-based privileges to restrict who could edit and view content. Future ministry needs (such as discussion boards, weblogs, and calendars) then would require an integrated application framework. * Technical constraints: Deciding to play to our strengths, the team wanted to go with an open source solution written in Perl. Our sole technical person had lots of open source experience with Linux and Perl, Portland has very active Linux and Perl user groups, and the price was right (i.e., a free solution was all that was budgeted). But we learned that not all open source or free software is created equal.
