Tag Archives: open source

Creating Web Pages in Linux

Technology

Being a jack of all trades and a master of none I’m always looking for some help here or there when it comes to getting the job done. Now if I was a web developer I could write about web pages from a completely different angle, but I’m not. Recently I found a product called Bluefish that is very cool.

For what I’ve needed to do over the last few years didn’t need much imagination. I’d use the stock templates that came with the product and because of the implementation I didn’t really need to alter the html… and if I did I’m not a web developer so even if I wanted to there was only so much I could do. But of course the more you know the more you want to know so digging into html is something I’ve been toying with.

For the most part I’ve been using gedit or the vi editor but it always seems like I’d get lost matching up a table or column. That’s when I came across Bluefish. I have not had a chance to work with it very much lately but I can say I like what I see so far. The reviews from the site are from a few years back but the Sourceforge Project site is active. Looks like it could be the ticket for now.

I’ll post more after I get a chance to dig in.

Update April 29, 2005

Well I’m not sure how deep I’ll get into Bluefish I’m just not at that knowledge level yet. It has been a great asset though. See the Bluefish Features List for more details.

Open Source and CMS

Consulting,

As I talk with customers every day more and more information is moving to the web. Either an application from a software provider, a business process from a supplier or vendor, and even the customer themselves. Yes the web has been around for a while and this might seem like old news but from a business perspective sharing information over a public channel has been somewhat scary. However for the information that can be and should be shared internally, externally or both there are some very fine open source products to help.

Late 2001 I started a side project, for a proof of concept, to create an intranet for then department with my currnet employer. My requirements were it needed to be web based, users with accounts could post documents, and anyone can search to find information. In my search I found a number of CMS (Content Management Software) applications but only one stood out, Plone. What caught my eye the most was it’s UI, it conformed to all web standards and was usable in any browser. Now that didn’t mean a lot to the company, were’re a Microsoft shop, but it was important to me. Not to mention the fact is was a GPL product and the whole project would cost $0.00.
That was good cause I was completely on my own with no resources from the company.

The backend of Plone is Zope which is a great tool itself for building intranets and interactive sites from scratch. The pro’s I found were:

  • Considerable room for customization
  • Submission workflow so that posts can be reviewed prior to publishing
  • Users can be assigned different permissions which control access
  • Keyword association for like documents
  • Plain text, formatted text, html or proprietary document formats can be posted
  • Separate directory tree display for folder structure view
  • Ports for Linux, Windows, Mac, and BSD

The con’s were not that many:

  • Not current Linux distribution friendly, one to two distros behind
  • For non programmers could be difficult to modify or customize

Needless to say it has been a great learning expierence and has been well received. After 6 months the site had 25 different catagories of information with a total of 200 + pages of documentation, news, a calendar and a place for members personal web pages. And all of it came from the vanilla setup.

If you are looking for a CMS type solution on any major platform consider Plone.