| Open EdWeb - | Open Source CMS for Education |
Open EdWeb is the open source home for EdWeb 2.0
EdWeb 2.0 is a content management system designed for use by the K-12 community. Since starting out providing just a way to enable teachers with their own web sites, EdWeb 2.0 has grown into a mature application that includes additional niche areas that are often needed by K-12, but which most general open source site building applications are not very good at handling.
EdWeb 2.0 feature list
View Birdseye views and ground level views to the right to get an idea of what EdWeb 2.0 provides.
What EdWeb 2.0 is not
EdWeb does not currently provide for a comprehensive district level web site, nor does it provide comprehensive school web sites. The EdWeb Site Builder does provide for basic school/departmental/special project sites, but not enough for what a medium to large high school might require. EdWeb 2.0 is also not a generic content management system - it is designed specifically for educational organizations, and even more specifically is best suited to K-12.
Be a part of the Open EdWeb community
EdWeb 2.0, an ASP.NET application with the coding primarily in VB.NET, is a unique combination of Open Source, Microsoft's .NET platform, and some additional low-cost 3rd party components. While currently based on Microsoft's SQL Server 2005 as the data store, the future of EdWeb 2.0 includes development work to enable PostgreSQL as an optional data store.
The Open EdWeb project is lead by Gregory Thomson of Tierra Software Development. Gregory has been a webmaster in a K-12 school district since 1998, and uses the experience to enhance EdWeb 2.0 in ways that help with the day-to-day needs of the webmaster, teachers, and staff, as well as to provide a useful service to the community.
Open EdWeb should run fine on any server that supports ASP.NET 2.0, and which has access to a Microsoft SQL database. Open EdWeb does not care much about which version of Microsoft SQL Server is in use - it was originally developed using circa 2000, does fine with 2005, and does nothing specific to a version, so 2008 should work just as well also.
For small to medium school districts, the Express version of SQL should be fine. For medium to large school districts, Microsoft SQL Server Std. is recommended.
Open EdWeb is licensed under GPLv3 as of September 7, 2010, with the goal being to provide an open source, and free, option to K-12 school districts who may already be using an open source application such as Drupal, Joomla or Plone for their web site, but who are still in need of additional pieces that do not work well with those packages.
Open EdWeb can also work great for school disticts that have an inhouse web site that they like, and don't want to replace, but which makes it hard to enable individual teacher web sites without having to purchase, and pay dearly, for them.
If you would like to use EdWeb 2.0, but do not have time to get involved in the setup and maintenance, the commercial arm of EdWeb 2.0 provides hosting options here. The hosting prices are aligned with general web hosting companies, and if you are hosting your teacher web sites somewhere else, you will probably be pleasantly surprised at the prices for EdWeb 2.0 hosting.
If you would like to be involved in the Open EdWeb Community, feel free to browse around, download Open EdWeb and give it a try, and if it's right for you, come back and participate as much, or as little, as you have time and interest in doing.
Open EdWeb, as an open source CMS, can work well in conjunction with other open source apps that a school district may be using (i.e. Drupal, Joomla, Plone, etc...), which don't handle content management to the individual teacher level.
Birdseye view of EdWeb
30,000 foot view of EdWeb
20,000 foot view of EdWeb
10,000 foot view of EdWeb
1,000 foot view (teacher sites)
1,000 foot view (Share Portal sites)
1,000 foot view (Site Builder sites)
Squirrelseye view of EdWeb
For a teacher
For the media
Press releases
Graphics
Company & Community Overview
Recent news
10/03/2010
October 2010 updates available in the Downloads section.
09/14/2010
A comparison of popular CMS options has been added to help show where EdWeb 2.0, and Open EdWeb can fit in best - view the comparison PDF here
09/07/2010
The official release of Open EdWeb is now available...
in the downloads section of this site
08/26/2010
The official release of Open EdWeb has changed...
I got an urgent request to include a district-level 'Board Policies & Admin Regs' function into EdWeb in the next 2 or 3 weeks, and that's an important aspect for EdWeb going forward, so I pushed forward the release date to 09/07/2010 so that I can include the basic infrastucture pieces in the initial release.
08/15/2010
Open EdWeb RC2 has been posted in the downloads section, along with a small update immediately after. Scheduled release of Open EdWeb on 09/01/2010 still looking feasible.
07/11/2010
EdWeb 2.0 is now SQL Injection protected, and all SQL work is using parameterized queries - I'm sleeping better tonight :-)