Tremont Street ShulWiki
Temple Beth Shalom

About the TBS web site

The Temple Beth Shalom Web site has been around for almost as long as the net has. It was the first synagogue web site in the Boston area and one of the first in the world. When we sat down to redesign the site it was important to build a site that could be more easily maintained by volunteers with various levels of computer skills. Arnold Reinhold originally suggested having a community area driven by a wiki. The wiki is a great way to support contributions from members of the community; this has now become one of the underlying themes of the site.

We are using a number of open source software packages to run the TBS web site.

• Our on-line calendar is driven by Plans. Plans was exceedingly simple to set up. It has most of the features that we needed: multiple calendars with sharable items, on-line event entry, and pretty output. We also looked at ucal which looks like it will be a behemoth of a calendaring package when it stabilizes. Hebrew Cal was used to generate candle lighting and jewish holiday information.
  • We've made a number of modifications to the plans calendar including a tbs monthly list view which was specifically designed to be email freindly.
  • The 20s30s page and the front page schedule information is regenerated from the calendar every night.
  • We've added a bunch of custom icons to the calendar.
  • And lastly KOE in New York is using the tbs modified version of plans, and we've shared some icons and code with http://www.templesanjose.org/
• The shul wiki is based on pmWiki which has provided some nice security features as well as a template system that allows the wiki to blend in with the rest of the site.
  • Currently the only major addition to pmWiki is our minyan signup page module: Signups.Sunday Morning
• The photo gallery is based on coppermine,coppermine has a nice categorization engine, as well as the ability to show the last uploaded and random images. gallery was also looked at.

Where possible we're contributing back to the development of the packages. So far that's been mostly fixes and suggestions to Plans.

Our site is being hosted by phpwebhosting which provides an awful lot of toys for 10 bucks a month. Thanks to the volunteers who've hosted the site before that.

We hope to be of service to the TBS community and others in the Greater Cambridge area. Let us know if you have suggestions or comments.

-gedalia