What Is the Opus System?
It is easy for customers to pay Web developers to create customized websites, yet not so simple to apply changes once the developer cashes the check, leaving customers with a stunning, but useless, product. Paul Oldham found himself in such a situation during his quest to design an online newspaper for an English village. The result was Opus, a free, user-friendly and open source tool that updates website pages on-the-fly and has helped non-profit organizations function on the Web at minimal cost.
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Origins
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Paul Oldham created Opus as a tool to aid in the publication of an online newspaper for the Village of Milton, Cambridgeshire in England. Oldham recursively named his tool “Opus” for Opus Publishing System, as is traditional for open-source software. "Opus" also happened to be the name of the penguin in the Bloom County comics and would serve as the software's mascot. Opus evolved into a full-fledged, multipurpose content management system. A community of English Linux and website developers known as The Hug continue to refine and maintain the software today.
How It Operates
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Opus features a graphical user interface with templates called Web forms that are stored on the template and by which users can add Web content. Each website is called a “paper,” and each Web page is called an “article.” Editors, or the website owners, define a set of authors to provide content for the Web page. Authors may choose to create news articles (in-depth stories) or hypertext-rich articles. Authors write content in Web forms using plain text or HTML, which are uploaded to a server to publish immediately or on a future date.
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Additional Features
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In addition to providing Web page content, Opus provides users with the ability to upload images via FTP and manage those images in a MySQL database. The software package also provides the ability to publish non-hypertext documents as articles, such as those in PDF or Microsoft Word format. The system contains a proprietary search engine that finds relevant content within the website.
Technical Details
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Opus will operate on a Web server with PHP and MySQL installed on it and running Apache. To access Opus from a client computer, users must install a Web browser capable of accepting and tracking cookies. Examples include Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Opera. Users do not need to have any programming experience to use the tool.
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