Between April 2003 and March 2004 APLAWS was developed further in the Local Authority Websites National Project (LAWs) as part of the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister’s programme for 100% electronic service delivery by 2005. APLAWS was one of four previously funded Pathfinder Projects incorporated in the LAWs National Project. For more information visit the LAWs project website.
This work strand developed the APLAWS CMS further. The overall aim was to deliver a freely available content management solution that met the interoperability, metadata and accessibility requirements (see the Standards section) set for UK local authorities.
The following describes how the CMS Work Strand has dealt with each deliverable, describing the approach taken and pointing to available resources where appropriate. To obtain the full code please go to the download area.
| Work Package | Key Products |
| Code Architecture |
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| Bug Fixing |
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| Back-end usability |
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| PostgreSQL port |
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| XML Starter Kit |
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| Standards Integration |
|
| Starter-kit integration |
|
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APLAWS+ is a series of applications, content types, metadata standards and accessible templates built on top of the Red Hat CMS. This CMS uses the Red Hat Web Application Framework (WAF). The best way to understand the system architecture is to look at the underlying WAF framework architecture described in the following document:
APLAWS+ is a very complex system which has very extensive documentation. We have decided to include the following documents as 'core' documentation:
APLAWS+ is being stored and distributed via the SourceForge web site. SourceForge is an industry standard location for the distribution of open source projects. It also houses the facilities for running basic functions for the community around distribution, such as mailing lists.
The primary means of distributing the code is as a distribution bundle. Each such bundle contains all files necessary to install APLAWS+ for a given context. The set of bundles are:
There will also be other downloads available from the SourceForge site. In particular the site will contain:
The SourceForge downloads area is therefore organised into the following sections:
The initial release from the LAWs project is APLAWS+ version 1.0.0. The initial set of distribution bundles were as follows:
The file name gives the following information:
aplaws-plus- <bundle name>-1.<code update version>.<minor update version>-<build number>.zip
The bundle name will either be standard, demo, dev or complete.
The code update version indicates changes to the underlying code base or major updates to the bundle contents.
The minor update version indicates minor changes to the bundles that are not connected with the underlying code base. For example, improvements to the default templates, or major improvements of the documentation will be reflected as a change to this minor update version number.
The build number reflects which run of the actual build process generated this particular file. Changes in this number reflect iterations of the process that leads to the publication of a particular version of the distribution bundles.
All distribution bundles will contain the followings shared components:
Each distribution bundle will then also contain the following further components tailored appropriately for the bundle:
The standard distribution bundle contains the official version of the APLAWS+ release. This bundle contains only the approved set of content types and applications, the official default templates, the full set of controlled category lists and default content. Therefore this bundle is the official LAWs output distribution.
Demo Distribution Bundle
The demo distribution bundle will be tailored towards people wishing to install a version of APLAWS for demonstration purposes. This bundle will have differences from the main release, such as:
The development distribution bundle is designed specifically for use when developing new content types or new applications to run with APLAWS+. There is no requirement to use this particular bundle for development purposes. ALL other bundles contain all of the tools and code necessary to set up a development environment. The purpose of this bundle is therefore simply a convenience that makes setting up and running the development environment ever so slightly easier with this bundle. The likely differences between this bundle and the standard bundle are:
This bundle contains everything available for distribution.
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From the initial release of APLAWS in April 2002 there have been a series of improvements, which have been applied to different versions at different times. During the development phase of APLAWS+ there have been a series of new bugs encountered. A bug tracking system was set up with Red Hat, which was actively used and has played a major role in ensuring the stability of the code.
The CMS work strand has released four different 'development' versions of the code:
These versions were all made publicly available and the CMS work strand received considerable feedback from different users. The fixes throughout this process were all stored in the bug tracking system and are available in the following file:
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The aim of this work package was to make changes that would benefit the majority of users, in particular the standard users who use the system on a regular basis. At all stages during the process, quality measures were included to ensure that appropriate changes were made and these were checked and evaluated throughout the project.
A full document (126 kb) addresses how the APLAWS User Group was consulted and helped to achieve the following objectives:
The new features added to the APLAWS+ code are also available here
The CMS work strand has released four different 'development' versions of the code:
These versions were all fully functional in PostgreSQL. Red Hat produced a unified search API which allowed programmers to write applications that work with either PostgreSQL or Oracle. This code was delivered in ALPHA 2. The installation process successfully installs APLAWS+ using either PostgreSQL or Oracle with only minor configuration differences.
The three pilot installations are all running APLAWS+ on PostgreSQL.
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The original APLAWS project didn't deliver a comprehensive XSL template management tool. This meant that every time users tried to update their look and feel they had to produce a new build of the software, and deploy it in the production boxes.
The CMS work strand tackled this problem by developing a 'themes' application which allows the user to do the following:
All these features are managed from the backend user interface.
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http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/documents/metadataV2.pdf
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This key product deliverable changed during development of the project. The CMS work strand products for this work package are the following:
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