Portal/Choice of technology

From Steeple

What should the portal be built in?

A quick survey at the Tech Workshop showed that php/mysql have the widest acceptance among partners, and would make for easiest deployment, e.g. via LAMP stacks, "linux apache mysql php". Sometimes proprietary technologies were preferred, but it was accepted that a community build would need to rely on open technologies. LAMP stacks are widely available as hosting solutions, and thus the barrier to deploying the system is low.

Using php/mysql has the added advantage that code could be repurposed to produce plugins for the following content management systems:

• Word press
• Drupal
• Joomla
• Mediawiki
• Moodle.

This would only take very minor modifications, for instance by adding a wrapper around the stand-alone code. Thus for organisations using one of these content management systems already, integration of video with the content management system would be quite straight forward. Many institutions use those content management systems by default for setting up web sites.