As I am the architect of this Web Content Management Solution you may wonder why I very seldomly write about this topic here. When I started this blog I primarily regarded it to be a strict "off work" resource about my random thoughts and everything I felt to talk about, apart from software.

As it looks now, the thing I primarly feel like talking about is: software. Just have a look across the last postings. While I do not think that is really a good sign (there are definitely other things and thoughts happening for me, but they somehow don't make it into the blog) it surely makes my initial intentions about this blog medium obsolete. So, good or not: we might as well talk about OpenWGA here then :-)

There are three basic things about OpenWGA as a web content management platform that you are likely to hear:

• It has very sophisticated user tools. We place very strong emphasis on our user interfaces so that authors and administrators actually like working with our products. If you see our Content Manager and Admin Client we hope you will agree with us that they are among the best browser-based tools for their tasks that are available as well as possible.
  
• It's flexible and therefor complex. Someone might think it's flexible beyond recognition for a WebCMS and that it is more of a development platform for making the CMS system of your needs. This is because most of our creations tend to be half website/half data-driven web application. By having a development platform we are able to serve both needs within the same system. But what is sure is that you first need to invest some work, either learning the concepts and building the base system, to actually see something like a website coming out of the system. You can build it to completely match your needs, but you also have to.
  

The last thing actually was OK for the time that WGA was a conventional proprietary-licensed enterprise software, because customers expected the need to first invest some learning and setup before having something usable. But now OpenWGA is free and open source, therefor the "open" in the name. As now very different people with very different problems are looking at us, and as we are now competing with a hoard of lightweight "out-of-the-box" CMS we are very dedicated to the task of making easy things easily accomplished, while of course still keeping an important bit of the known flexibility that might ultimately make you want to build with us.

This is where our brand new basic website kit enters the plan. A basic OpenWGA site building kit for some rather common requirements which will help you get your customized site up in ... well maybe not "no-time" but "as-little-time-as-is-really-rational". And to be clear: This is not one of those "build a website in 3 clicks" wizard which really is very easy to use but will never produce anything that you would regard being production-ready. We actually use this kit ourselves to build many new customer websites so we are quite convinced that it serves its purpose well.

Now, we have updated the official documentation about this new way of getting started, but I still feel there is something missing. When I myself start with any new software I seldomly use its official documentation to get running. Most of the time I instead use an external tutorial of someone who was in the exact same situation as I am. These tutorials are often more concise in really identifying each single, neccessary step between the bloody setup and finally having something to show, so they tend to be better beginner resources.

As the creator of the software to use I may not be the best choice for someone to write this tutorial, as I of course are always in the danger of skipping things that are obvious to me, but not to you. But well, as I now have a new private use-case for the kit - I want to setup a new website to host my private software creations - I may be the first one to have a try.

And to keep myself from skipping important things I will do everything from scratch, including the setup of the development environment. Also I will do it on Windows (Yes, that was a joke).