The quest for DB websites: SharePoint, Joomla and LAMP...

For well over a year we’ve been working on finding ways to help our district branches with website hosting.  Initially, we sought out to develop a lightweight content management system for smaller branches who have limited or no websites.  What we come up with was a nice little application that was quite easy to use, but never caught on.  It suffered from being too limited and lacked many features that DBs want. 

Last summer, several branches submitted infrastructure grant requests for web design and development work.  Most of them were well thought out and had clear and reasonable goals, but were not individually unique.  Rather than funding several small development efforts, we elected to revisit the APA provided option and explore ways to improve it so that it would be more attractive.  Ultimately, we decided to scrap our internal work and opt for an outside vendor.
Last week, we approved a work order with Susquehanna, a local SharePoint Integrator.  They will be building a portal system based on Microsoft SharePoint server that will allow district branches to have full-featured websites that include many of the same features found on www.psych.org such as member directory, member’s areas, and easy content management.  We are working with a small group of branches in the pilot and development of this and hope to make significant progress before the annual meeting.  

Alternatively, we have been working with Dr. Sharmat to provide hosted sites on a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) server using the open source content management system Joomla.  This system is now available and we can host a few sites if any district branches want to experiment with it.  Joomla is similar in approach to our initial work, but much more full featured.  It is a good tool for creating a web presence, but has limitations as well.  Key among them is its lack of integration with our back office member data, so testers will need to keep that in mind. 

The New York work in progress can be viewed here.

Anyone interested in having a LAMP based Joomla site setup can contact me for details.