Content Management Systems

Last week in my System Administration course, we were assigned a small individual project involving setting up and documenting the installation of a content management system. The websites would be hosted on our professor's cluster, where we would be able to VNC into a console and configure the website behind the scenes. We were able to pick our operating system of choice and a (free, open source) content management system to use for our website. Feeling curious, I was personally a little interested in stepping outside of my own boundaries and decided to take the Non-Windows approach to this task..

For my operating system, I selected Debian. Debian is a "free operating system (OS) for your computer. Debian uses the Linux kernel (the core of an operating system), but most of the basic OS tools come from the GNU project; hence the name GNU/Linux."

I had little experience with Debian before this project. We used it in last year's Cyberdefense Competition at Iowa State University to run our Snort firewall. While I did little installation and configuration on my part for the system, I was able to understand the basics of how to use it and figured I should get more comfortable with it before this year's competition.

As for my content management system, I went with a very popularly used management system named MediaWiki. MediaWiki is a "free software open source wiki package written in PHP, originally for use on Wikipedia. It is now used by several other projects of the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation and by many other wikis."

I had never setup a content management system myself and hardly used any before. Again, my only experience with MediaWiki in the past was for the Cyberdefense Competition, where we needed to document all of our systems and configurations. That was one of the gems of why I chose MediaWiki over other CMS's, like SilverStripe or Drupal, is that MediaWiki is very useful for documentation.


Overall, I was really satisfied with how the configuration and installation of this management system went. I found that package installation and configuration can be a lot simpler than some Windows-based software and it made me enjoy this project more. I ran into a few snags here and there and ended up having to scrap the entire project and start over after realizing I had forgotten to take screenshots for my tutorial (oops!), but I also realized I had skipped and messed up a few steps, such as installing an old version of MediaWiki, so it was nice to get my feet wet before jumping in.


My website can be found here, where I have a full in-depth tutorial on how to setup and configure MediaWiki on Debian.