website options

Tue Sep 29 15:12:17 EDT 2015

Wow- your IT department is really tying both your arms behind your back! What’s the point of having your own web server without any server-side coding language support?

You might tell your administration: nothing is free. Open source is free to purchase, but requires your time for setup, updates, upgrades, installs. As others have pointed out, if you want a database driven site, you need server side languages.

Personally, I would try to get your administration to consider a Wordpress hosted solution. We have a sandbox on Hostgator that runs us about $100 a year, which hosts many of our development projects, test installs and other also hosts: http://booksbythebanks.org. On that install, we added a few custom tables to a standard Wordpress install. Not hard to do at all.

In the long run, hosted Wordpress  will be your cheapest option when you take into account your time: learning a new system (you already know Wordpress),  design, testing, etc... It could be totally free if your IT department would let you host this on their servers.

If all that doesn’t work, I would definitely consider Christian’s suggestion.

Good Luck!

From: Web technologies in libraries [mailto:WEB4LIB at LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Shannon E. Fox
Sent: Tuesday, September 29, 2015 12:23 PM
To: WEB4LIB at LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Subject: Re: [WEB4LIB] website options

Cost is definitely an issue. All requests for hosted options have been rejected. Also, getting IT to support certain software or scripting languages on the library webserver has been unsuccessful so far. IT has said no both to installations of PHP and ASP.net and trials of open source content management systems. Our webserver is separate from the college’s so that is why they do not want to support two separate installations of technologies (beyond HTML) as they fear there will be problems that will later require them to fix. IT has locked down the college WordPress CMS tight, so when I attempted widgets/search boxes or anything we have embedded in current website, WordPress stripped out the coding. Subsequently, I was informed they did not want to turn anything on that would compromise security. I would not be an admin but I can choose from several templates for each page, but basically our pages would consist only of verbiage, links and pictures for content. That is why we held off on migrating to the college CMS. Additionally, there is a new design for the college website and it is responsive design, but they have not applied it to subsites like ours (the one for the library I have not completed) and they do not know yet when they would apply the new design across the board so that all sites look the same. We are a small college library and I am the only webpage creator/editor. (Sorry -- answering previous questions as well. ☺ )

I appreciate all of the suggestions though, there is much to consider that I definitely will investigate.

Current website: http://abell.austincollege.edu/abell/ on our own IT hosted server

Current college website: http://www.austincollege.edu/

Subsite on the previous design: http://newlibrary.austincollege.edu/ -- what I started but have not completed

Shannon

From: Web technologies in libraries [mailto:WEB4LIB at LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Laura Robbins
Sent: Tuesday, September 29, 2015 9:00 AM
To: WEB4LIB at LISTSERV.ND.EDU<mailto:WEB4LIB at LISTSERV.ND.EDU>
Subject: Re: [WEB4LIB] website options

If cost is an issue, then you could investigate using a wiki, like pmwiki.  Pmwiki is php based and you can customize templates for a standard look.  We use that for part of our website.  You could also look at SubjectsPlus.  It's an open source alternative to LibGuides that handles course guides, database pages, staff pages, and an FAQ.  We're going to move to that very soon.  Right now our site is a mix of static pages, database-driven pages, and wiki pages.  SubjectsPlus will allow more folks to be involved in maintaining the site.

Laura Pope Robbins
Professor/Reference Librarian
Dowling College

On Sep 29, 2015, at 9:39 AM, "Haitz, Lisa (haitzlm)" <haitzlm at ucmail.uc.edu<mailto:haitzlm at ucmail.uc.edu>> wrote:

I think some of your choice may depend on who is using your site to update content. For example, we have 50 editors on our site.  I alone manage 42 sites by myself.

Are you the only one on your site doing updates? if so, a static site might work for you. If not, you will be better of with a CMS.

We have our main site on Adobe Experience Manager (university Provided), extensive Guides on Campus Guides CMS, as well as about 25 or so blogs and exhibits on two different installs of Networks of Wordpress (sometimes called Wordpress MU).

Why do you not want to use Wordpress that your University supplies? Is it too locked down? Will they give you admin control of the site?

We survived for years using Dreamweaver templates and Server Side Includes, so a template based php system might work for you. Though I have used it for years, I too have been reluctant to go to Adobe s cloud services.

As someone else pointed out, if you University is supporting Wordpress, then they are supporting PHP!

On September 29, 2015, at 3:30 AM, Christian Pietsch <chr.pietsch+web4lib at GOOGLEMAIL.COM<mailto:chr.pietsch+web4lib at GOOGLEMAIL.COM>> wrote:
Hi Shannon,

dynamically generated websites have turned out to be terribly brittle,
slow, and insecure. Current HTML5 is so powerful that for most use
cases, you don't really need them. Not even for blogs.

I would always first try to use a static website generator such as
Jekyll <https://jekyllrb.com/>, which is free and open source.
It allows you to author blog posts in Markdown which is essentially
plain text with very unobtrusive markup like people use in e-mails.

Cheers,
Christian

On Mon, Sep 28, 2015 at 11:53:38PM +0000, Shannon E. Fox wrote:
> A year later we still have not solved our dilemma of what to do for the next iteration of our academic library website. If we migrate to the college website WordPress-based CMS, we lose functionality that we prefer to keep. Hosting solutions are too expensive for our tight budget. We prefer not to rent Dreamweaver from Adobe Cloud. I began looking at open source solutions besides Drupal and similar ones that require technology our IT department is unwilling to support (PHP, ASP.net<http://ASP.net>, etc.) on the webserver they host for us (java is okay on it  but not in the WordPress CMS). I see that there are numerous open source and low-cost alternatives and the selection is overwhelming. Has anyone on this list employed a low cost html editor or responsive design software package to create/maintain an academic library website? I have an old version of Dreamweaver that is becoming "glitchy" and I prefer to redesign our website with modern coding and responsive design.

--
  Christian Pietsch · http://purl.org/net/pietsch
  LibTec · Library Technology and Knowledge Management
  Bielefeld University Library, Bielefeld, Germany

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