Ingram Micro NewServer

In the final year of (MBO) school, I worked at Ingram Micro B.V. in Nieuwegein in the Netherlands for an internship. This was from February 2009 until end of June that same year.

My school required that I completed one major project that would take up half of the time that I was working there. There was an idea about what I could do, but there was a lot of preparation work involved. That preparation ended up taking too long, which meant I needed a new project.

The website

The website, that I was already maintaining, was getting a little old. Scripts were built in strange and outdated ways without even the use of basic PHP includes. The server was still running PHP 4 and running on an outdated operating system. Something was bound to go wrong one day.

It had become my task to set up a new server for a new website, and move all the still useful scripts to the new one. This had to be set up internally before it could go live on the first of June 2009. Employees from the marketing department that were still using the old website scripts would have to get used to a Content Management System.

The first task was choosing a CMS. I looked at previously suggested systems like Joomla, but quickly concluded that they didn't fit the requirements. I came across a new type of CMS called Concrete5. A relatively new CMS that was free under the MIT license and very easy to use and didn't require a lot of technical knowledge.

Adjustments had to be made, to the CMS and the new server, in order to get it to work. New additions for the CMS had to be created as they were going to replace all of the functionalities from the current website. These additions would also simplified many things which made migrating more appealing.

The final result of the project was a website were people could edit with as little coding as possible. The server was also finally up-to-date again and could be updated more often than was done before.

Documentation

My school signed off on my project after my internship, along with all the user documentation I had written. Some 200 pages of it. The documentation itself was very useful to the community of Concrete5 as they were missing some at the time.

I shared (Link appears to no longer work due to changes on the website) my English and Dutch versions. Since this project I haven't gone back to Concrete5, but I have noticed it became a basis for other manuals as well.