Steve Williams wrote:
hmmmmm..... to enter the minefield ....... at stoke all was not as it would seem....yes the 'licences' were free for the applaws CMS - but there were some pretty hefty compulsory installation, consultancy and maintenance costs that resulted in the 'free' translating into a bundle that took it to a cost that was equivalent to some of the 'off the shelf solutions' that are available and were being considered.
The costs were not compulsory. Anyone can go to
http://www.aplaws.org.uk
and download the latest release and install and build it for
himself/herself. However, while the code is free, support, maintenance,
installation, and customization aren't, and that's what Stoke paid for
and received.
If my understanding is correct the original applaws project was aimed at establishing a set of standards for navigation, metadata and accessibility that could be applied to the CM arena. The extension of this into a full project was taken on by some of the members of that project and is infact a revamped version of arsdigita - again please correct me if this is not the case - this is what I have been able to glean (and seems to be supported by the 'help' from redhat (who took over arsdigita)).
APLAWS is indeed based on code that was originally developed at
ArsDigita. Red Hat has since taken that code over and invested heavily
in improving and extending that code (a dedicated engineering team of
eight engineers/QA/release/doc have worked on it for the past year, in
addition to others in the UK).
The original project and the ensuing product are not necessarily one and the same thing. For example - one of the 'contributors' to the original project (age concern) is actually using reddot and not the applaws product. The fact that one of the original goals was accessibility and the fact that the ensuing product seems to have issues with blind readers, would seem to serve to highlight how the two aspects of the applaws project (defining standards and building a solution (as we are led to believe)) are in essence, less that the same. It also amuses me slightly as we have proven concept with the German equivalent of the RNIB so that blind readers can not only be used to read the output but to actually input via the CMS - wish I had known that applaws had these issues when we were talking to stoke :-).....
APLAWS was not designed to be a complete out of the box solution. It was a framework to enable you to implement a CMS solution as detailed below. For example it provides support for different output formats so as to be suitable for blind users, but does not actually provide the complete styling, since the styling is always customized.
Happy new year, everyone.
Richard
Red Hat, Inc.
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