Our new class website has launched. And it’s a portal.

Google succeeded by being just a search and not a portal. The previous version of this site succeeded by being a private forum, not a portal.

So why have I made us a portal?

Just to give you some background, here’s where we’ve come from:

Version 1: October 2004

Early in first term, now about a year ago, I put up the first version of this site. I was using Mambo on a tip from Errol, and a content management system like that seemed like a good place to start.

On the whole, I enjoyed using Mambo. However, I’m simply not its target audience. I want to understand simple, modular source files, not gargantuan and barely-documented includes that are subject to change with every release.

Mambo was weak in its ability to co-operate with other software. We’d been using a forum plugin called Simpleboard, but there were several problems with it bigger than I was willing to fix.

Version 2: February 2005

I decided that the primary components that we’d been using in Mambo were the forum and the front-page news. The limited additional functionality just we’re worth the hassle.

So V2 revolved entirely around an installation of phpBB2. News items were sucked out of a designated forum, and it was a breeze to assign users as capable of posting items to the news forum.

Version 2 also brought about a form of privacy protection. I realised that it would be important to myself and my colleagues that our discussions not be viewed by non-class-members. And definitely not archived for eternity by search engines.

It was the phpBB2 usergroup mechanism that saved the day. I was able to easily assign ‘Trons’ a higher level of access that regular ‘Members’. And then I made a special authentication script which screen-scraped the UW student directory to confirm membership in our class. It was a (mostly) painless and automatic process to join up.

And it paid off. During exam season in Term 1B, we had about 100 users per week logging in to check up on things and compare notes.

Perhaps it even paid off too well. Exam stress brought on nervous humour and the signal-to-noise ratio became intolerable as previously academic threads got repeatedly derailed.

Version 3: September 2005

What was the solution? A wiki. All the collected academic knowledge, event organization, announcements, and other such things would go in a wiki. Then the forum would be free for discussion and no longer bound to its role as a source of reference information.

The new site is now running PunBB and MediaWiki together. They’re both authenticating on the PunBB user tables. As with the forum, the wiki is “mostly private.” There are handful of designated public pages, but on the whole it remains something for just the hundred or so of us.

A Portal

It’s the homepage that’s changed the most. It’s a three-column Jello affair, just packed with information. Too much information? I hope not.

I remember a year ago when I was initially scoping out a CMS how frustrating it was to see demo setups “just packed with information.” Polls, random quotes, lists of links, what is this? It’s just a bunch of stuff that I’m going to have to maintain as an administrator. And when it gets stale, it’s going to look terrible.

But the Tron portal is powered by the users. “Sweet Links” is pulling from a collaborative Del.icio.us feed. The quotes are randomly pulled from a wiki page. This isn’t stuff that I’m going to have to log into some obscure interface to change– it’s right there.

I think that’s really important. It’s said that wikis bring a sense of ownership because of the collaborative spirit. I hope we can get some of that here as well.

Mike

← Earlier Later → Posted at 3:09 pm to Internet, PHP, Website.