I am very happy that our PSVP progressing towards making wonderful website for the big temple.
THEBIGTEMPLE.COM is registered today morning.
bigtemple.com is already registered and for precaution I registered "thebigtemple.com" before any formal domain name finalised by PSVP board.
This domain is ready to transfer on PSVP trust anytime.
Further as a IT worker, I would suggest CMS(Content Management System) based webserver would be relevant for the proposed website.
Many of us can directly produce document using templates and authorised by top level content manager presumably one of us.
CMS makes direct work sharing and the work will be done before next "Sadhaya Vizha".
CMS is my personal suggestion based on my work experience as CMS adminstrator at one of the UK borough council. Various departments in the council are producing content themselves selecting relevant templates. Then it is authorised by another CMS manager or myself.
We have some free opensource CMS available and able to use them.
I am surprised RR's local government system effectively existing in UK. They run schools, hospitals, taxing, planning, building control and etc. with in their perimeter. Amazing!
That is a good devt. I think we are still discussing the domain name stuff - but this is not a problem in my opinion. Let us go ahead and later on expand our scope.
CMS I am ok with it though I do not have good exposure. You may have to show us some examples of how it works
While CMS is the best solution for giving data, it is not advisable for presenting data. It requires a good understanding of the database structure for designing templates.
I feel we cant run any CMS ... nucleus, phpnuke, blogcms, dotnetnuke, mambo in particular) out-of-the-box without some modification {I am not as familiar with the last two ones as the remaining}.
I am familiar with phpnuke. It has a good database structure, and additional modules are available. Blogcms is more popular nowadays. Its wiki is text-file based (slower than database...).
Opensource CMS is suitable for mostly, I opinie, blogs and content-based sites. Though content is important, presentation is going to be of utmost importance for this bigtemple project. For example, we cant just use the gallery module to simply upload and put the images of bigtemple's and its paintings and show them as thumbnails. Ditto with temple tour.
Btw, what is going to be the site's database? MySQL? Most webhosts offer an older version of MySQL. No stored procedures, no views, nothing. If the site is going to have tamil content, we better have a newer version. Unicode (Tamil) support is available from MySQL 4.1 and above versions. Postgres would be okay. SQL Server server would be perfect, but would cost more. ;-) MS Access----ha ha ha. But Tamil support is good. ;-)
What we have in our varalaaru.com is indeed a CMS, content management system. A content management system is a software that helps one to manage the content in a site. The basic features of a content management system would include a provision for creating different levels of users (admin, general user, supervisor), interface for the users to post articles/images, etc., and an interface to approve/disapprove the posted articles/images to be shown to the general public.
Opensource content management system refers to such a software that is freely downloadable and distributable. It may include many modules in addition to the basic posting articles. Opensource CMSs are related to content management as what Tally to accounting, MS Excel to spreadsheet program, MS Word to word processing. It is a generalized software for managing content in a website.
Though a novice in general can install it and get a site up and running in minutes, coding level modification may be required depending upon what we use a opensource CMS for. For example, if we want to use a Opensource CMS to use for a magazine site, we need to create a table in the database to include the articles IDs with date of issue and issueID. The homepage coding should be modified such that it pulls out the article IDs for the current issue and show the article titles.
THEBIGTEMPLE.COM domain name is perfect matching for the big temple.
Futher I checked bigtemple.com and its already registered by someone.
CHOLATEMPLES.COM not yet registered but its collectively respresenting temples.
There is a best opensource CMS(content management system) available as MySource Matrix(http://matrix.squiz.net/). It is used by Australian/Newzealand govt departments. Supporting opensource PHP and PostgreSQL database.
I welcome other friends plans and ideas. So that it would help PSVP board.