Over the summer I looked at several technologies that will drastically change the way I do things on a daily basis. There are several new technologies readily available that enable me to easily create dynamic content in a predefined environment that is trivial to setup… and more importantly — free.
I’ve looked at several CRM’s and I’m installing one now. CRM=Content Management System. Of course, I have been using a CRM of sorts for a while. A blog is a specific type of CRM. I was looking at something I could host myself. Something that was more flexible.
I started with a wiki. The term, wiki wiki is Hawaiian for quick, fast or informal. The most popular wiki is http://wikipedia.org the open source online encyclopedia. It took a few hours, but I got a wiki up and running. My home server is a Windows 2003 Server. So I had to first install PHP. This is the scripting language that most wiki use for processing information. Then I installed a database server. Most wiki’s use MySQL. Both PHP and MySQL are free.
I played around with several wiki’s, but couldn’t find one that did exactly what I wanted. Then I found Mambo
Mambo uses both PHP and MySQL. Getting it to work with those components was fairly easy.
The advantage of a Read/Write webserver is the convenience of others adding content to my server. Of course, I don’t want just anyone coming in and creating content on my server. So everything is password protected. All users are required to have a username and password. This allows me to control exactly who is on the list of people that I trust to create content on my server.
I have a Mambo server available only to my Intranet right now. As I work with it more, I’ll open it up to the outside.
More later.