SEO Expert Blog

In the Using open source software to design, develop, and deploy a collaborative Web site series of articles members of the IBM Internet Technology Group show how to use open source tools to simplify the development of a relatively complicated Web site. The team describes a fictitious organization, International Business Council (IBC), that requires a Web site with the following functionality to meet their current business needs:

• document storage
• discussion groups
• specialized workgroups
• conference scheduling
• schedule session descriptions
• session expiration

To illustrate the creation of this website the team chose to use the following open source systems:

• Drupal CMS
• MySQL database
• PHP scripting language
• Apache Web server
• Eclipse development environment
• CVS source code version management

After introducing the business scenario and explaining their choice of open source tools the author's will provide step-by-step guidelines to building the development environment, getting started with Drupal, interaction of Drupal with other tools, building custom Drupal modules and deploying and tuning your installation.