Institutional Web Management Workshop 2004:
Technical Architecture Of The IWMW 2004 Web Site

About This Document

This document describes the technical architecture of the IWMW 2004 Web site. The aims of this document are:

• To provide documentation for colleagues at UKOLN.
• To ensure that documentation is available if staff leave and new staff begin work on supporting the Web site.
• To ensure that documentation is provided on software dependencies so that appropriate testing can be carried out if software is updated.
• To provide documentation in case the Web site migrates to a third arty.
• To provide an example of the ttype of documentation which may be useful to others.

Server Architecture

Server Software

The IWMW 2004 Web site runs under the Apache Web server software which hosts the main UKOLN Web site.

Server Applications

No special server application are used by the IWMW 2004 Web site apart from:

• A CGI script which is used to process online bookings.
• A CGI script which is used to process online bookings for parallel sessions.

However the following general UKOLN applications are used:

• The ,tools checking utilties are used to ensure the Web site is functioning correctly.
• The UKOLN search facility

Third Party Applications

The IWMW 2004 Web site makes use of the third-party Sitemeter software for providing usage statistics.

Summary Of Page Authoring Architecture

Architecture

The resources on the Web site make use of the PHP scripting language. PHP scripts are used to:

• Pull in server-side include files, such as DTD definitions, navigational fragments, content fragments, etc.
• Pull in metadata assignments are convert to appropriate format (<meta> tags in XHTML)
• Repurpose the content fragments by assembling details of sessions into a songle HTML page for ease of viewing and printing.

Procedures

Most directories contain a intro.php and content.ssi file. The intro.php file contains a series of SSIs which pull in the DTD, navigation fragments and the conetnt fragment. In addition this file defines various metadata values which can then be reused elseweher. The content.ssi contains the content fragment in simple XHTML format.