Open Source Content Management

Your friendly neighborhood Linux systems admin here with a post about the Linux Foundation web infrastructure. The web site has grown organically one piece at a time. The existing main application for www.linuxfoundation.org is Mediawiki. This was put together as a temporary web site when the Free Standards Group and Open Source Development Labs were in the process of merging into the Linux Foundation. That was in December of 2006.

Since this time many other needs have come up. We added Wordpress MU for our blogs. We added a Phorum installation for OpenPrinting discussions, forums.openprinting.org. Our events site is run on Drupal and CiviCRM.

The issue has always been how to meet all the technological needs with a bare minimum of staff. Many of you out there could code solutions in place to glue the applications together. Since, I am not a strong developer I have focused on staying with the stock applications for ease of upgrades.

How do you put together a cohesive infrastructure completely based on open source applications that work together seamlessly without coding highly customized solutions?

We are trying to answer that question.

Two companies are assisting us in the process. Chicago Tech is focusing on our overall web infrastructure design. We met with them in mid July to go over our design goals and information architecture. It was an exciting meeting as we are moving toward a designed and planned solution rather than tacked on pieces here and there.

Cognisync has designed the Linux Developer Network that will be unveiled sometime in August. Cognisync specializes in developing online communities. Our hope is the LDN will become a collaborative community for open source developers starting with the Linux Standard Base community.

I'll give you a hint. We are moving to Drupal as the primary CMS and we will be integrating as much of our site within Drupal as possible. Check back here for updates on our progress.

David