Apr 3, 2009 GATE Village

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So, if you saw and read my mass email blast of April 2^nd for the GATE Open House, you'll already be aware that we've postponed the Open House by one week ... of course this decision costs us $25 because we have already purchased a liquor license, but well what are you gonna do?

The decision to postpone was based on the fact that there is no real chance that we could complete all of the tasks that we need to complete for the event by the 17^th; it would have been an incredible feat even with Gary's full support but under the circumstances it just makes more sense to move it forward.

While we are still about two weeks away from launch, we have the GATE Village platform chosen and being put together now. We've got a site (not available outside of the GATE House right now) that has 90% of a "shopping cart"/ payment system, a user-profile/account management facility, strong encryption technology, and much, much more (though that's about all we'll launch with).

It is based on an open source product called Drupal, you can read about it yourself at http://drupal.org/; while I had hoped that our new Director of IS&T would have the pleasure of actually choosing the platform, I have had to preempt him and do declare that V1 is based on Drupal 6.10. It seems very solid, and fairly easy to customize and add to, it opens up many new possibilities that I'll not go into details here but trust me, this was quite a find!

Oh, and good on Matthew for finding and pointing it out!

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