carthage webdev

As the webmaster for a small liberal arts college, I am responsible for a largish site with a very loosely defined set of controls. I inherited an environment where all of our 15,000 or so pages were maintained by hand, and have been moving toward automating bits and pieces. Two years ago, a few students (including Mike and Chris) built a content management system to manage a portion of Carthage's pages, most notably the home pages (one for on-campus and one for off-campus). That CMS, named Quahog in honor of the TV show "Family Guy," was built with Coldfusion. I'll discuss how we came to decide to move away from Quahog and Coldfusion in a subsequent post, but in a nutshell it came down to a desire on my part to learn something new rather than dissatisfaction with Coldfusion. Anyway, as the spring semester wore on and my thoughts started to turn toward plans for summer projects. (Summer ends up being a very good time for large projects – student workers who are around mostly full-time and less day-to-day maintenance keeping us busy/distracted.) The limitations of some of the design decisions that went into Quahog were starting to become apparent. Several academic departments were using Macrodobe Contribute, and I was starting to become less than satisfied with that tool, and also I couldn't shake a gnawing uncertatinty about that product's future at Adobe. Chris and Ivan are both exceptionally talented as far as web development goes (whatever other talents they have is beyond the scope of their employment and this blog), and they are both graduating in December 2006. (And they'll be looking for work – hire them!) So, between some limitations in Quahog, a desire to build a more comprehensive CMS that could wean some departments off of Contribute, and the realization that this was my last chance to have Mike, Chris and Ivan work on a big project together for Carthage, I decided that the primary focus of our summer would be building what I tentatively called "Q2" – the successor to Siberian Portal about WEB-SecurityQuahog.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 8th, 2006 at 10:08 pm and is filed under Dave, backstory. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.