[Wylug-discuss] Commercial grade PHP applications

[Tim Fletcher]

On 29/06/12 10:33, Glenn Glidden wrote:
> Hello.
>
> Can I ask, as a general discussion, if anyone knows of any commercial
> grade PHP applications or better still develops them?
>
> The reason I am asking is that I am looking (purely for personal
> development at the moment) at the possibility to create a schools
> administration system on a LAMP stack.
>
> I work in a school that is Microsoft Windows based.  Looking at the cost
> of the software we use at the moment (c. £12K pa then Microsoft
> Server/SQL Server licences on top) made me think what options were there
> for a FOSS version.  This is also a single server deployment, so no
> redundancy/failover or load balancing which would be an extra software
> licencing cost.
>
> (The idea was also prompted by my doing a recent Microsoft Server
> version upgrade to see all the memory on a 54GB box and Microsoft
> deciding our legitimate licence key wasn't right and knocking it back to
> see only 4GB.  Lost my virtualised email servers and remote desktop for
> half a day because of that.  I want the control on my servers!)

I work for a large school (2000 students), and we currently use a 
mixture of FOSS and propitiatory software.

The key point with FOSS software is that there is a trade off between 
paying of licenses in the Microsoft world vs the payment of fair 
salaries to support staff in the FOSS world.

The problem for FOSS in schools is that staff who can look after FOSS 
systems well are for the most part not cheap and are harder to find than 
sysadmins that can look after Microsoft based systems. For a school they 
can understand and budget for a capital spend of 20-30k every few years 
for a Microsoft server solution with a bog standard £22-25k sysadmin. 
The FOSS solution of spending "nothing" on server software and then 
having to pay the sysadmin to look after it £35k+on costs (which takes 
it closer to £45k a year) changes the values.

Just to complicate matters Microsoft have also got a licensing program 
called "Campus licensing" that is extramely good value for schools, we 
pay ~9k a year for the full Microsoft desktop stack (Windows+Office on 
all 800 computers) as well as server licensing. Yes 9k is more than 0 
but may very well be less than the increased support costs of a FOSS 
solution.

I am not and never will be an apologist for propitiatory software but I 
have worked for 13 years in a school which has made good use of and got 
excellent value from FOSS software and I have had to fight these battles 
more than once.

> So, wondering what knowledge and experience is out there for this sort
> of thing.  I'm looking at a personal project to develop an admin system
> in PHP but considering deployment requirements in the future.  Am I
> probably looking at a particular framework, etc.?
>
> Any comments?

We have tried to do this in the past and it's a massive undertaking and 
in the end the people that where doing it have been spun off into a 
separate company called School Data Services (sds.ac), they are now 
focusing on behaviour management and reporting. If you get in touch with 
Andrew Rose (he's the PHP monkey) or Ed Whittaker (ex-teacher) mention 
my name.

-- 
Tim Fletcher <tim at night-shade.org.uk>