The WGBH.org Development Blog

Filed by Phil at 9:44 am under CMS, Architecture

Before we move forward with the redesign of WGBH.org, let’s take a few minutes to look back. After all, those who don’t learn from history… yada yada yada.

First off, a point of clarification: when we discuss WGBH.org here, we’ll generally be talking about www.WGBH.org, and not one of the many subsites/subdomains that you may encounter (e.g. shop.wgbh.org, forum.wgbh.org, lab.wgbh.org, etc.). Those sites and related tool sets don’t fall under my purview. Thank goodness, too, because my hands are full with the “main” WGBH site (not to mention being a parent - but that’s a whole other story).

Now, the current version of WGBH.org - more or less - launched in the Spring of 2002. Do you recall 2002? Does anybody remember laughter? I sure do!

• The New England Patriots won their first Super Bowl
• Queen Elizabeth celebrated her Golden Jubilee
• Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake were still an item

Ah, good times.

Anyhow, I came on board WGBH that summer and took over the maintenance and continued development of the web site and associated content management system (CMS). Though much work has been done on the site over the last 5+ years to improve functionality and performance, the essential site architecture (both hardware and software) hasn’t changed. Here’s what we’ve got…

Back End

• Hardware - All Solaris. Two web servers, one database server, plus development and test suites.
• CMS - The current content management system was based on the ArsDigita Community System (ACS), an open source CMS, written in TCL and PL/SQL.
• Database - Oracle
• Web Server - AOLServer
• Code Control - CVS

All of this is hosted in-house. Now, rich media (i.e. streams, podcasts, downloads) are hosted on a separate, externally hosted server. We moved these out-of-house a couple of years ago to ease the bandwidth burden on our internal network. Te sholw rich media end of things is another kettle of fish that I’ll let Pete Bull talk more about tin the near future…

Anyhow, the ACS was/is quite flexible, in that - once you get up to speed with it - creating new content types and modules isn’t too painful. By “isn’t too painful” I, of course, mean that in the best 2002 sense (i.e. assuming you know TCL and PL/SQL and don’t mind doing a lot of hand coding it’s not so bad).

Anyway, that’s the system that we’ve had and we’ve done well with it, all things considered. However, after 6 years, it’s more than time for an overhaul of the back end. There are much better tools available that easily support all of the Web 2.0 bells and whistles we want out of the box but that our current system doesn’t natively offer (e.g. comments, RSS feeds, blogs, etc.). So, it’s time to junk the (sort of) beloved old jalopy and get us some new wheels!

Front End

Lots of things have changed with WGBH in the last six years which have made the information architecture that was designed back in 2001/02 somewhat obsolete. The biggest change is the growth of our TV offerings. Back in 2002 we had 2 local broadcast channels: channels 2 (WGBH) and 44 (WGBX). Today we have those channels plus one local cable channel (Boston Kids & Family), three digital cable channels (‘GBH Kids, WGBH Create and World), a high definition channel (WGBH HD) as well as on demand offerings. The current site just wasn’t designed to handle that many channels.

We’ve also learned a lot over the years about what our visitors like and don’t like and what works and doesn’t work on the site, so we’d really like to reorganize the information in a more user friendly way. We’ve already done a lot of thinking on how to reorganize things and we even have a plan of attack, which I’ll be talking about as we go along.

Finally, like an aging celebrity, every few years the site could really use a face lift - or at least a few shots of Botox.

So, there you have it. More details on the old system will be coming as we build the new tools and site.

Onward!