Introduction

  The Community Learning Network (CLN) is part of the “Bang the Drum” program, an initiative headed by St. Christopher House to provide computer and internet access to the community.The CLN specifically, is a content management system, built to educate its users on topics such as online web publishing and online community awareness. It provides users with the opportunity to build their own websites, share information between groups, and participate in web discussions through the use of online forums.

 The CLN plays a vital role in bringing technology to those without access. It is a complex web application that needs to be “up” on a constant basis. The goal of this document is to give the CLN administrators a primer on how to install, maintain and upgrade the system.

The CLN is built using the LAMP architecture. LAMP is an acronym for Linux Apache MySQL and PHP. Linux is the operating system, Apache is the web server, MySQL is the database server and PHP is the programming language used to build the web application.

 The CLN is an open source project authored by the Working Group and is licensed under the GPL (GNU Public License). This basically means that the software is free to use and that the underlying code is readily available to view and modify by anyone wishing to do so.  The project is available at:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/bangthedrumcln/

The first section of this document, “CLN Installation”, describes how to download and install the necessary components to get CLN up and running. The second section, CLN Maintenance”, documents how to install modules, upgrade the CLN when is a new version available, and use tools such as PHPMyAdmin to configure and maintain the system.