Plaza Status
Joanne Graham
March 1, 2004
Since the last status report, the web developer position previously held by
Scott Kehoe was vacated. We are currently looking to refill that position. In
the interim, we have a temporary (Chris Bailey, who was previously filling the
student assistant role) in that position who is working on a number of projects,
including:
- Design and deployment of a new home page
- Consolidation of the registration system
- Cleanup of the code base
- Site documentation
- Place code base under CVS
- Site support
There is much discussion internally about where we want to go with our site,
and what skills we need to look for in a web developer in order to accomplish
that. In the best of all worlds we’ll be looking for someone who has excellent
web system administration skills (including a deep understanding of Apache and
Tomcat modules and integration issues), can act as our site DBA, has experience
in web applications development in a number of languages, is willing to deal
with site content issues, can handle community support for the site, and is
able to assist staff, who use a variety of publishing methodologies, make easy
use of the site’s content infrastructure. This will be a hard slot to
fill given all of the requirements, but we are hopeful of finding someone with
all of these skills at least at some level.
One of our first priorities once we have a full-time staff back on this project
will be to determine what is still lingering behind on the old site (not just
content, but functionality), what core functionality we want on our new site,
and how to get there. There is concern that the current site framework may not
be adequate for moving forward so an assessment of that will be done early on.
Once that is accomplished and the site is stable we’ll begin talking again
about the idea of web-based collaborations, web services, personalization, and
other more state-of-the art functionalities that we’ve toyed with the
idea of in the past. We will use the community to help guide our way.
