Migration to CTER Portal
From WikEd
In Fall of 2004, CTER's web site was migrated to the CTER Portal. This page discusses the rationale behind the move to a portal server--the strengths and advantages over the traditional method of maintaining a web site.
Contents |
Ease of Management
The most advantageous technical reason for using a portal is the ease of accessing the site for adding or editing information. Managers can access the web site without any FTP program or commands and edit content on the spot in a secure way.
Consistent Design
The CTER Portal provides ways to keep the overall web site design consistent with less amount of time spent in programming. Blocks of CSS code are accessible through web-driven menus and can be modified without any special authoring software. This allows the site manager to spend more time on content than on the design of a web site.
Customizability
The Portal has features that can be enabled or disabled depending on needs and preferences. For example, in each of the pages, a "send this page to a friend" icon was available by default. This would allow viewers to send an informational page via email to anyone who would need it. However, a possibility that this feature would be abused existed and since the server's resources may become compromised, the feature was disabled. The process of disabling was easy.
Security
The portal itself has a management interface that allows the portal administrator to provide appropriate privileges to any user registered in the portal for managing the content. These privileges are not tied into the operating system, and thus may allow for a more secure method of managing the server.
Transferability
Web sites are often managed by graduate students, and because they "graduate", tracking down the location of critical information may be difficult when they leave their posts. Because the file & directory structures are transparent in the portal, the portal makes any transfer in task responsibility easier compared to managing traditional web sites.
(to be continued)
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