Today, Web sites are a necessary element of business and the tools to create and deploy them are becoming easier to use. However, for complicated sites that require more than just the standard methods of interaction and update, Web site development is still not turnkey. Many customizations are often necessary for each application within an organization.

The open source community has provided a number of tools that begin to work together quite well toward the development of complicated Web sites. This collection of articles from members of the IBM Internet Technology Group shows you how to use open source tools as a basis and provides a methodology and set of enhancements to simplify the process of Web site development. While customization is still necessary, these articles demonstrate the use of tools and techniques to get relatively complicated Web sites up and running quickly.

In this series of articles, the Internet Technology Group team describes a fictitious organization that requires a customized Web site that includes, among other things, document storage, discussion groups, specialized workgroups, conference scheduling, and schedule session descriptions. They illustrate the creation of this Web site using the following open source tools:

• Drupal. An open source content management system
• MySQL. An open source database store
• PHP. A Web-based language for supporting dynamic content with PHPMyAdmin and SQLBrowse
• Apache. An open source Web server
• Eclipse. An open source development environment
• CVS. A source code management system that tracks changes in your code

The team begins by introducing the business scenario and the factors that drove them to choose open source tools and by describing a flexible design methodology to address the process of designing applications. This process can be used to design a user experience for Web sites or applications. They then provide step-by-step guidelines to the installation and use of the development tool suite described above. These guidelines include:

• Building your development environment
• Getting started with Drupal
• Observing the interaction of Drupal with other software tools (such as MySQL, Ajax, and PHP)
• Building custom Drupal modules
• Deploying and tuning your installation

Along the way, the team compares this approach with other options and discusses possible enhancements to this suite of tools by connecting to other software components.

Link to project implementation.