ICCA Community Website Vision
Independent Computer Consultants Association

Its time to revisit what the ICCA web site wll do for its members, that means you! Last year, I did a complete overhaul of the web site's application engine keeping the same content and general look and feel. This year, its time to change everything.

During my discussions with Joyce Burkard, ICCA's Executive Director, I see that two things are needed immediately. What is the ICCA logo, motto or theme that greets me? Why would I use the ICCA web site today?

Background

A year ago, I took the initiative in the wee hours of the night, to rewrite the entire ICCA web site. After seven years of discouragement from the ICCA members controlling the web site, I convinced Joyce to let me see the database schema and in two days a new ICCA web site was created. Frankly, the previous web site effort was past failing bogged down in the politics of being managed by those that don't know stiffling the creativity of those that did know. After a green light discussion with the Board, we went live with the new site on May 1, 2008 with no fan fare because the site looked exactly like the previous version with different web page extension.

The previous web site was written by amateur Visual Basic programmers using Microsoft's Internet Information Server and Microsoft's Active Server Pages with a Microsoft Access database. If was OK in 1995, when the only PC operating system was Windows and the free web server for Windows was Microsoft's IIS, but not today. Basically, this is what a child, college student or Microsoft coolaide drinker would choose, especially with the alternatives available today and for the past ten years. And, there was no source code protection, no way to coordinate project work, no way to create private test web sites, the web site hackers tested on the live site. What a nightmare for years and years that the ICCA National Office had to put with.

Now the ICCA Web site is a LAMP based open-source project that everyone can participate in its development protected by Subversion. No longer Windows, now Linux. No longer Microsoft IIS, now Apache. No longer Microsoft Access, now MySQL. No longer ASP, now PHP. I turned on the LAMP, can you see the light!

If you are interested in the ICCA Web site projtect, there are many articles that I wrote describing the project choices, including: a complete ICCA Web Site Project Plan, the Differenes of PHP and ASP, the PHP templating engine, the Differences of MySQL and Microsoft Access databases, the ICCA web application directory tree layout, PHP security, HTML validation, and more.

What is ICCA?

ICCA is an Association of Computer Consultants that are Independent of vending any specific products or the final decision the client's makes. ICCA members deliver services that solve business problems across all Disciplines, Businesses, Technologies, Operating Systems, Hardware, Applications, Services and Programming Langauges.

ICCA as a Community

ICCA Web Site Theme

ICCA Web Site as a Professional Social Network