Please review this paper I'm writing

[david at thekramers.net (David Kramer)]

On Thu, 13 Dec 2001, Drew Taylor wrote:

> Not that I'm an expert or anything, but it seems good to me. It covers all
> the basics, is nicely written and easy to follow. Who/what are you writing
> this for if you don't mind me asking?

The temple I joined a few months ago currently has their website hosted
for free at some Jewish organizations's host (hhtp://www.uahc.org).
While there are quite a few CGI scripts at our disposal, it is missing
some basic functionality, and you have to ftp in with the one and only
userid/password to put up content.

A half-hearted website committee formed last summer that didn't even meet
once.  But when I talked to the president of the temple about how I would
like to help out with the website and what I would like to do with it, he
thought it would be a good kick in the rear to get that group
jump-started.  So now we've had a meeting or two, and some things are
happening.  One of those things is we got the go-ahead to go to a real
web hosting company, so we can do our own scripts and mailing lists and
whatnot.

The chairperson "knows a little about computers", and is less than
diligent in doing the tasks assigned to her, but I've sorta been running
things defacto (running meetings, running a committee mailing list I set
up on my box, outlining the kinds of things we can do...), and she's just
speaker-to-management[0].  Others in the group are highly technical, but
have not done web development per se before.  That means I'll be doing
most of the back-end development myself, but that's OK.

One of our "prime directives" is to maintain privacy for the congregation.
that means that the general public should not see phone numbers,
birthdates of students, certain financial information, etc.  Another one,
one we gave ourselves, is that we need to let committee members add their
own content, instead of submitting it to us to post.  The only way to
accomplish these objectives is to have a real honest-to-goodness
professional security model.  Since I've already implemented this on my
website[1], the work is pretty much done (maybe a
little tweaking).

Does that answer your question?  Thanks for taking the time to read it. By
the way, the diagram was done in dia on my linux box, and exported as a
PNG file.  I'm not 100% satisfied with the results, because it doesn have
the normal ERD arrows for 1-n, n-n, n-1, 1-1, but it's not bad.

[0]Larry Niven reference.
[1]using PHP with a MySQL database.
---
DDDD   David Kramer                           http://thekramers.net
DK KD  "In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit
DKK D  the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to
DK KD  live in a world that no longer exists."
DDDD                                      - Eric Hoffer (1902-1983)