IE: Dublin selects open source tool for building cities network

The city's "Facebook or MySpace for city officials" was unveiled in November. It is meant to help city officials create and maintain links with their colleagues. "How many conferences and events do cities attend or seek to promote internationally? How many of the valuable contacts made and project co-operation discussed evaporate after such events? Citieslinked is designed to ensure that people can keep contact with one another."

The web site's developers favoured Drupal, the open source content management system, over others they considered, such as Joomla, another open source CMS, saying it performs slightly better. The developers have considerable experience with Drupal, one of them explains by email. "Its greatest advantage is that you have the power to determine the site structure. It also is user friendly and manages search engines well. With Drupal you can have literally anything: publish articles, have a blog, a forum, a shop or a classifieds section."

The Citieslinked Drupal is installed on Microsoft IIS webservers. According to the developer this is because the hosting company happens to run Windows servers. There was no other reason for picking the proprietary IIS over for example the open source web server Apache. "Development is actually undertaken on an internal Apache server prior to transferring a site to the live host."

Dublin city council did not choose Drupal because it is open source software, says the developer. "We have no particular preference for such software."

The web site so far has two channels, one for the Union of Capitals of the European Union and the other for the Cities of the Isles network.


More information:

Citieslinked