Allium

Allium is the web application that drives the website of the CCNY Department of Mathematics.

History

Allium was originally written circa 2007 by Peter Brinkmann. This original version of Allium was written in Ruby on Rails. It deployed on a server running Ubuntu Server Edition 7.04 (Feisty Fawn). Software doesn't get any cooler than that.

The design of the CCNY Math page was derived from the OpenTech template, publicly available at Open Web Design. The CCNY Math page design has slowly evolved over time.

In 2010, Peter Brinkmann left City College and took a job at Google. At that point, Pat Hooper took over administering Allium.

In 2020, a second version of Allium was written by Pat Hooper. This new version is written in Django (a Python Web framework) and is deployed on a newer version of Ubuntu. This new version of Allium duplicates the functionality of the original version, but it is hoped that the new version will be easier to maintain and improve. It was also able to take advantage of more modern web frameworks to make programming easier.

In 2024, substantial changes were made to the website to make it comply with CCNY branding guidelines and to make the site more accessible.

Goals

Allium was designed by Peter Brinkmann to achieve a number of goals:

• Provide a professional, uniform web presence for an academic department.
• Improve communications as well as the flow of information within a department.
• Help ensure that all information is up to date and accessible to all users, including the blind and vision impaired.
• Minimize the workload of the webmaster by automating or decentralizing most maintenance tasks.
• Most importantly, make web administration fun!

Documents

• allium_brochure.pdf: Allium marketing brochure by Peter Brinkmann
• allium_manual.pdf: Allium user's guide by Peter Brinkmann