Technical Stuff
We are often asked about the underlying technical aspects of the oz-teachernet site. Hopefully this section will address a few of these questions (and reduce the email to my inbox).
History
The site first started its life running on a unix system back in 1995 with the list server software Majordomo. From here the server was changed to a windows nt4 server running netscape webserver and using the list server software Lyris. In 2001 the the server eventually moved to a windows 2000 server now running apache as its webserver. The server still ran the list server software Lyris however the list server struck all sorts of problems running on this platform and the expense of renewing licenses for a free service became too much. It was time to address the increasing costs and the decreasing funding.
Current
In 2003 after much testing the server was moved from a windows server platform to a Linux platform. The Linux server currently runs a variety of opensource applications to server the needs of the oz-teacher projects and activities. Some of the opensource software used by oz-teachernet includes:
Until April 1, 2007, we were using the Content Management System (CMS) Postnuke. This system was a heavily customised system which did serve the purpose it was originally implemented for. However, with the changing nature of projects and also trying to respond to the needs of users, we needed a more flexible system to manage our projects. On April Fool's day of 2007 the oz-teachers project Management System (PMS) was released. This system while a progress in development is now used to manage the projects that we host and support. The system can be considered a web 2.0 application if you believe the hype around this. For more information about web 2.0 there is a great resource at wikipedia.
The software development cycle for the PMS has worked well and the use of multiple test environments has been central to the successful development of this PMS. The PMS can be considered a work in progress and as changes are tested they are then pushed to the live site.
Last Modified: 13:07:57 Tuesday, 11 March, 2008
