"Project Westgate" is a collection of websites deployed using a multi-site installation of the Drupal content management system. This system creates a federation of the websites deployed within, with systems build specifically to facilitate this. Westgate is the main development effort of the bikegeeks.

Purpose

The goal of Westgate is to provide a single web-based system, based on an open-source, popular, and well-maintained CMS system for all the websites of the various grass roots groups serving the BTG Member Organizations. This provides two basic and important things:

First, it provides a unified web system for all of those websites. More often than not, the same people in the the community were the ones to work on these sites (the folks that eventually came together and called themselves the 'bikegeeks'). It became frustrating to have so many different deployments out there, running on different servers, with different access rules and capabilities. Because Westgate is served from a single machine using a single system, site maintenance, deployment, and backup have become trivial. Moreover, having all those web sites running independently incurred far higher costs than running everything from one server.

Second, it provides the stake-holder an easy way for them to maintain their own content. Before, most websites were deployed on servers using static HTML pages or simple PHP pages. Updating these pages required modification of the page itself, often accessible only via FTP. This forced the activists who ran the sites to interrupt their work to communicate their vision to someone who could work the technology -- this lost time and coherency, and often became a point of stress when schedules (since this is all volunteer work) didn't match up. The CMS allows the stake-holders to update their own sites which they can do whenever the thought hits them.

About the name "Westgate"

We took the name Westgate from the coffee shop we were meeting from at the time. The coffee shop, formerly on the corner of Madison and Sangamon, was a perfect meeting place for us. It was on Madison the North/South dividing line for the city, making it convenient for Northside and Southside geeks alike. They had tasty food, good coffee, and free Internet access. What more could a geek want? They also had a large group table near the back we could all sit around while we worked. We chose to take the name "Westgate" because the places was great (and because we couldn't think of a better one. When Westgate (the coffee shop) closed its doors, we were sorry to loose our meeting place, but glad to know our former meeting place's name would live on in this project...