Welcome to the beta testing of the next Fair Park Collaboration Portal. This beta site will serve as a test bed for the future faculty/staff portal, and the functionality will ultimately be decided by the very people that use it. The final product is far from completion, and the path to it can only get clearer by participation from as many users as possible.

Its been around a year since the initial version was launched, and it has had some success. The reason for its lack of impact was due to convolution. This is my fault. The convolution of the previous portal came mainly from the use of four application systems in the name of: wordpress, phpBB, mediaWiki, and gallery2. The original thought behind using four systems to carry out the functions of the portal came from the notion that these applications do one thing very, very well. However, from a user's point of view, learning the idiosyncrasies of these applications can become a very arduous task when paired with the idiosyncrasies of dozens of high-school aged personalities each day. This is a lesson learned on my part.

So, after writing down some ideas to reboot this website and give it a bit more life, I went back to working with Drupal. Drupal is a content management application which does several things in an "okish" fashion. It doesn't have the depth of forum functionality that phpbb does. It also doesn't have out-of-box wiki functionality. It has some limited photo hosting capabilities which are enhanced by third party add-on modules. However, it easily facilitates multi-user blogging capabilities, openID authentication, and a one-stop shop for basic team communication, as well as the capability to make a very interactive audience facing website/web identity.

Again, this is one application installed on this particular website. This application is enhanced through third-party add-on modules. As the beta progresses, modules will be closely scrutinized and evaluated. Depending on the outcomes, they may or may not be removed from the website. This application and its add-on modules are provided via free/open source software developers. Free software or software libre is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with minimal restrictions only to ensure that further recipients can also do these things. In practice, for software to be distributed as free software, the human readable form of the program (the "source code") must be made available to the recipient along with a notice granting the above permissions. Such a notice is a "free software license", or, in theory, could be a notice saying that the source code is released into the public domain.