Ambercon 2011 * April 14th-17th, 2011 * Detroit, Michigan

So, what is behind the new AmberCon US website?  And why?

The short answer is the new website is running on Drupal, an open source Content Management System (CMS), written in PHP, running on a LAMP (Linux Apache Mysql, PHP) stack at an ISP (Pair).

What

The website is hosted at Pair, a professional Internet Service Provider (ISP) on a Webdeveloper account.  The site has its own dedicated IP address.  The ISP runs their servers quite professionally and provide a stable platform (documented in Pair's knowledge base article):

• FreeBSD (currently version 6.2-RELEASE-p1)
• Apache webserver (currently version 2.2.10)
• MySQL database (currently version 5.0.45)
• PHP (currently version 5.2.6)

The framework for the website is provided by the open source CMS Drupal.

We are running all of the core modules and all of the optional core modules, and the following add-on modules:

• Frontpage
• Advanced Help
• Code Filter
• Email Confirm
• FAQ
• FCKeditor
• IMCE
• Integrated Metatags
• Local Menu
• Mollom
• MultiBlock
• Pathauto
• PNG Fix
• Preferred Format
• Sections
• ShareThis
• Submit Again
• Taxonomy Manager
• Teaser by Content Type
• Token
• Webform
• Printer-friendly
• Google Analytics

We have about half a dozen custom-PHP blocks and a customized theme (based on the community-provided theme ability).

Why

For two main reasons:

1. To provide a framework for hosting Ambercon websites and put the ability to maintain the website in the hands of the organizers without having to modify code.
    
2. To implement the website using standard platforms, technologies, languages, frameworks and products that are open source and have wide support from a developer and user community.

Edwin