The Library Geek

Part 2 of 4

Development

Local Host Drupal installation

Prof. Faires approved my proposal but expressed some concerns on two aspects of my project proposal: first, on whether a wiki is the best tool for a content management system; and second, in terms of security and protecting confidential information on a wiki.

What are wikis? Wikis are nothing more than a collection of web pages wherein any user can create content using a simplified markup language (Wikis, n.d.). What makes wikis unique from another web page is that as a tool it democratized content creation and simplified project collaboration even if the user does not have a background in web design. It works as a knowledge base system since it allows users to create pages and write content that can be edited by other users or if they so choose, limited to a community of users. In the same vein, it works as a project collaboration tool since it allows users to upload project files or documents online and edit, view revisions, and even revert back to previous versions of the same document. User can even have a discussion page and to talk about their edits and revision tabbed on the page of their project files (Farkas, 2007). MediaWiki is one of the more popular wikis because of the following reasons: it is the platform used by Wikipedia, the popular online free encyclopedia; it is an open-source software, roughly meaning that its copyright is in the public domain making it free and therefore almost no restrictions in terms of download and use; and because of the preceding reason there exist an active community of users that is actively supporting it.

Local Host Liferay installation

A wiki can be an effective platform for an organization’s intranet and I have seen really great examples of it ranging from academic to corporate institutions. But I must admit that my plan and chosen tool was a bit nebulous at the start and bolstered only by the sheer audacity of my assumptions that a few hours of trawling the internet and going through the class resources on wikis will be enough to do my project. And after a few hours of research on the Web, my resolve on using MediaWiki as the platform for my project was wavering.

I was concerned about how opinions I’ve read on the Web seem to view wikis as great as a knowledge base system, like Wikipedia, but might not be extendible enough as an intranet-document storage-and communication tool. Wikis can function as a content management system, and like what I’ve said there are examples of it on the Web, but I want to try a robust web application to use for my project. I don’t want to start developing my intranet and realize at the middle that the tool I am using is not scalable or extendible enough for other features I want to incorporate on my intranet project. So I went online and researched for another possible platform for my project. The results of my search seem to suggest that I will be better off using a content management system software rather than making a software act as a content management system. I don’t even know if a distinction exist, but it seems to me that what I should do is use available web application that are content management system software rather than following my original plan of  using a wiki to behave as a content management system. Furthermore, it is more challenging to use a new tool rather than use MediaWiki again in my final project since I have already used that tool in an earlier activity.

To address the issue of security, confidentiality, and proprietary nature of organizational content I used sample documents from different sources readily available on the net for my content rather than actual documents from PAL, since this is not a project I am undertaking for my place of employment (although I might show this to my supervisor). I also fictionalize the organization, referring to it as the MY Library System rather than by name. However, I still used as a template, in very general brush strokes, my place of employment’s organizational structure and information needs as I have described briefly in my introduction. Even though the issue of security became moot with my decision of using sample documents (sources cited) I still developed the intranet project as if it required security to simulate an intranet that is not accessible to anonymous users.

Local Host WordPress installation

Testing

Since my researched clued me to the existence of several viable candidates for a content management system, I decided to try those that appeals to me and choose the one that best fit my project needs. The candidates for my web content management systems are:

1.      Drupal

2.      Liferay

3.      WordPress

I included WordPress among my possible tools because of several articles I read online that are actually promoting it as a content management system. Also, the localhost-wordpress installation and subsequent intranet project I built was really easy to do that it only took me a few minutes to come up with an example. The trick is to install several plugins that would change the behavior of WordPress and simulate a content management system.

This might sound crazy or a bit obsessive but I did try all of them and in a way that delayed me in finishing this project early. I will briefly outline my thoughts and the process of testing each of these tools. The criteria I used to narrow and finally choose the tool to use are:

1.      It should be open-source and actively developed.

2.      Feature-rich that can be turned on and off, with lots of plugins to extend its functions.

3.      Can be tailored to be a close and secure system.

4.      Intuitive to use.

To test these tools I downloaded and installed Wampserver, which I was lucky enough to come across while viewing the tutorials on getting started with Drupal. Wampserver is a Windows web development environment. It has Apache, PHP, and MySQL. What it does is it allows me to install the web tools I am testing on my computer to simulate a web server. In that way I can build a site without worrying about messing up the Senna server.

After installing Wamp server, all you need to do is create a database on MySQL for every tool that you plan to install. Video step-by-step instructions on how to install Wamp server and Drupal (as the tool) is available on this site. Aside from Drupal, I also installed Liferay and WordPress.

Liferay runs on a Java environment and required the installation of Java SE. It brings you to a guest page to log in and create user accounts. Every user has a public and private page. It has ready-made Java-based plugins which they call portlet and all these plugins are already available to the user on the Liferay install so it does simply the process of building a page a lot as it becomes a drag and drop affair to tailor a page to your specification.

Drupal on the other hand requires the addition of plugins which they refer to as modules. The Drupal install is very light and the process of building how the site behaves is left with the user. This is similar to a WordPress install wherein extensions or plugins for the web tool is left in the hands of the user.

After testing all three platforms, I decided to use Drupal for my intranet project. In the end, it all came down to user preference, as all three web application is capable of serving as the platform for the intranet project, but I liked Drupal’s approach of leaving it up to the user to build his site from the ground up, rather than the Liferay strategy of bundling up all the portlets with the application. I was also not thrilled with having to install Java SE just to run Liferay and its feature of having both a public and private page available to the user. It is very confusing. I also liked the fact that Drupal’s site is chockfull of getting started guides, tutorials and an active community of users that have written excellent instruction guides on just about every example of how you want to use Drupal for. Finally, I sem some other personal uses for Drupal after this course so I think it will be beneficial for me to learn it through this activity rather than Liferay. I did not choose WordPress based on the same reason I did not go the wiki route for my platform. There are examples of those that have used WordPress as a content management system successfully but it did require a lot of modification through plugins to make it behave as such. Turning WordPress into a content management system is an interesting concept that I might look at in-depth at some other time.

continued on Part 3