Netropolis – Building a Website Part 1
A recent query got me thinking. Over the years I’ve done quite a bit on the website here and on the ORC site recently, and it has given me a bit of an insight into website creation and the technologies involved.
Most universities allow their societies some web space that they can use to create a web presence, as do some ISPs and some search engines like Yahoo. There’s good news and bad news with this: the good news is that much of the technology and software required (as well as the security) is already taken care of. The bad news is that you are unlikely to be able to do much other than create HTML pages and upload them via FTP or online. You probably won’t be able to create a lot of fancy bells and whistles for the site but you may not need them. Sites like this usually only need a page of information including a contact email address, and are easy to maintain. Straight HTML pages can be easily created without needing software such as Dreamweaver – software like Kompozer is free and easy to use.
However, there’s a lot more you can do with a website on a server that has PHP and MySQL installed. It is unlikely that you will have access to these on a shared server, such as a university one. To install them takes root/admin access and requires a fair amount of knowledge to maintain. Commercial providers such as Ariotek often provide these as standard, along with a fairly robust support architecture and security. And that’s another point – the more advanced the site, the more you need to make sure that you keep things secure. Create strong passwords when you can: upper and lowercase letters, with numbers and symbols as well. Resist the urge to write them down, or save them in a browser.
Most sites these days use a Content Management System or CMS, and usually requires PHP and MySQL. This provides a basic framework without any specific coding skills and can essentially give you a website off the peg. You will still need to tweak quite a lot of the site and create your content, but the tweaking won’t require a lot of PHP or HTML knowledge in all likelihood. You will need to make sure that the CMS software is patched and kept up to date, as exploits and hacks are discovered.
If you want a simple website, it’s very easy to pick up HTML and create a basic page or pages – it’s only when you want to have something more complicated in mind that it can become tricky
Here’s a few “case studies” (two require PHP and MySQL), based upon my experiences:
The Nova Games website
Back when I was part of a PBM games partnership, we used MS Publisher 97 to create a very simple website, a group of pages that described our games and who we were. It took a morning and we were live from that point on. We couldn’t do anything fancy like user forums or use a CMS, or anything similar, but at that time we didn’t need much: just a presence on the web.
It is very easy to create HTML pages now: so for a simple site that doesn’t require users to login or generate lots of dynamic content, stick with simple HTML pages. They’re straightforward to maintain and don’t require to much work to create.
The Mandragora website 2.0
The Mandragora website runs in WordPress, a popular open-source CMS, mainly used for blogging, but which can also be used for websites. A large number of plug-ins exist for WordPress – for instance, a plug-in allows publishing to Facebook or Livejournal, another allows you to create a Downloads page. There’s anti-spam plug-ins and other security utilities, some better than others, but all work together rather well. It has an also update facility and has a relatively small size upon a server. The template it uses was designed by a commercial product called Artisteer. I had to tweak a number of WordPress default settings to make it secure, and that’s an ongoing process.
The wiki part of the site uses the same software as Wikipedia, MediaWiki. This also has a number of plug-ins (or extensions as they are known in Mediawki, but I had to lock it down quite considerably as I didn’t want the content edited or vandalised. I also added a few extensions that improved social bookmarking and search engine optimisation, as well as adding a few admin tools.
Access is locked down to a few usernames only as I’m only the one who would make any changes. I could easily create a number of static pages, but they take longer to update individually should I make a change.
The ORC website
The ORC website is far more complicated, using Joomla as a CMS. Joomla also uses plugins and modules. As it is a community site theres a number of security tweaks I had to make to keep things secure. Kunena replaced the Fireboard forum module, UddeIM runs the Personal Messaging System, and Community Builder links the lot together in Joomla. A another module provides a secure CAPTCHA login, and another bridges the authentication to the ORC wiki (Mediawiki again, heavily tweaked).
As it is a community site, it requires a little more flexibility and increased security – the user details have to be kept private, along with their messages. Also, we don’t spammers flooding the forum (Kunena) with their crap, so the registration process needs a secure two-factor process – a captcha image and a confirmation email take care of this (courtesy of Community Builder). We also only want authenticated users to be able to edit the wiki, so I had to use a special module called a bridge to link Joomla and Mediawiki together. Other modules such as the Events calendar or Gallery, enable the registered users to submit events or photos.
At the end of the day, running a CMS website can be hard work. It needs regular patching for security and vulnerabilities, updating of the software components or plug-ins, as well as backups just in case something does go wrong. You can never have too many backups.
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