A New Year, a New Web Site and a New Column
Welcome to the new UAB CIS website! The web site that you see before you is the culmination of a design and development process that lasted well over a year, and we are pleased to be able to deliver the final product to you as we begin our celebration of the department's 40th anniversary.
When we set out to make the next-generation UAB CIS web site, we established several goals for what we wanted to accomplish. First, we wanted to build upon the successes of the current site. That meant keeping it easy to find information about our academic programs and research efforts as well as providing up to date information on department events and news.
Next, we wanted to make it easier for more members of our community to contribute content to the site. We wanted a system that would allow our content providers to focus on the content, not the publishing process; a system that would allow not just the IT staff but all of the faculty, staff, students and alumni to take an active role in the web site.
Third, we wanted to ensure that the site would stay fresh and relevant by adding features like monthly columns (such as this one) and CS industry news. And of course, we wanted to do all of this on a modern, good looking web site that befits our department's newfound status as a quadragenarian!
The process began with an evaluation of various web development platforms that are available in the market. I knew we needed something more robust than a plain Apache web server with a MySQL database, which was the basis for our previous web site. While these are certainly capable tools for running a web site, they don't address the content creation or publication process by themselves. So, I turned to a class of software known as Content Management Systems (CMS), which are designed for this purpose. There are hundreds of CMS products, both commercial and open source, ranging wildly in cost and complexity, so the evaluation process was quite involved.
As many of you know, I am a strong proponent of open source software (OSS), and much of the CIS infrastructure is enabled through the use of OSS. I wanted to keep to this model for our CMS, and with no shortage of OSS CMS choices out there, the team and I set out to take a look at the most popular options. A good CMS should be easy to setup and customize. It should provide tools for site users to publish content without needing to be experts in HTML, CSS or templating engines. And it should have a vibrant developer community who are creating new and interesting modules, extending the product in ways that the original developers never imagined, to customize it to new environments.
We eventually chose Drupal (http://www.drupal.org), a CMS that we feel has all of these characteristics, and one which is in widespread use at many companies, universities and organizations. The Drupal platform brings many benefits, including implementation in a language we already work with on the staff (PHP), easy integration into our LDAP account directory, a robust library of add-on modules and a convenient customization and extension framework. We also had the good fortune of welcoming Thom Savage, a CIS master's student and a Drupal expert, to the IT staff in August. Thom has spent the past five months installing, deploying, modifying, integrating, porting, expanding, hacking and slashing Drupal into the site we are launching today.
You'll find a lot of advanced functionality on our new web site. For instance, take a look at the great new course catalog, with clearly defined prerequisites and links to the current semester's offerings. The new event calendar system, with its colorful events and multiple views. The faculty profile pages which show all of the classes they are teaching. The new search feature, the RSS feeds, Industry News... all of them are features on the CIS web site for the first time.
While all of these represent new functionality for us, the truly exciting part of the project is that as we progress, additional new tools will be enabled on the site. Today, our faculty and staff are able to update their web content quicker than ever before, but in the coming months, that ease of content authoring will be extended to our students, who will be able to create their own profile page and take advantage of new ways to collaborate. Today, there is more information online about our IT and how to use it than at any time in the past. In the future, students will be able to help each other with their IT questions, posting their own solutions and answers. Today, it's easier to research our courses and plan your class schedule; soon, you'll be able to save that class schedule to your profile and cross-check it with program requirements. These features and others like them will continue to expand the scope and usability of our new web site.
We hope you are as excited about this new tool as we are, and we hope that you find yourself visiting often. If there's anything else you'd like to see on the site, please let me know.