My experience with the Charlottesville City School’s tech support has been anything but pleasant. I first ran into trouble with the school’s server system in Spring of last year, when I began to design the website for CHS’s Theatre Department. You see, I’d written this wonderful little Perl script to handle the image gallery. I mention it to CCS’s webmaster - “Oh, our server doesn’t support Perl.” Of course. It’s not like every web hosting company you come across these days supports it or anything…

So the website tumbles on for the next year or so, getting about 100 pageviews a day (heh, more than I can say for this blog, anyway…), generally working out. But the problem arises in finding a successor for next year, when I’m no longer around to manually edit the shtml. But lookie at what I’m using right now - a Content Management System. Perfect! Even my theatre teacher will be able to edit that after I’ve left the school. All I need now is a MySQL database.

Oh wait. The CCS server doesn’t support MySQL, either.

Apparently, I’m going to have to use the school’s CMS (Adobe’s Contribute) if I want to set one up on their server. Coranto won’t work either, because it requires Perl. Normally I wouldn’t complain about getting free Adobe software, but I’m not exactly in the mood to learn another new CMS at the moment. All I want is a MySQL database - is that so much to ask for?

That’s pretty silly. “The server doesn’t support MySQL” means “we couldn’t be arsed to install it.”

Not supporting MySQL is the weakest excuse — if you’re determined, you might be able to push back on them, noting that it’s a) free, b) easy-to-install, and c) could be used for a wide-variety of applications outside the CMS.

But whatever — were you planning on using WP for the CMS or something else? Also, Contribute is pretty bad; I personally don’t recommend it, even at the $150 price tag.

Eh, unfortunately, they’re pretty final in their decisions over at CCS. On random things, too - apparently, a CCS website can have its own domain only under “very special circumstances”…

Honestly, I may have no choice but to use Contribute. The school’s pretty adamant about having it hosted on school’s server, and without access to a database or perl…

Well, then… maybe you could set up a simple redirect on the school’s server that forwards (and masks) the URL to another, more competent server

I was actually just going to host the site myself to solve this, but the whole point of setting up a CMS is to ensure the site continues after I’ve left, and I can’t be sure that I’ll be able to keep hosting the site after I’m gone.

[...] will get updated once I’ve left for college. You may remember I tried to do this very thing two months ago, but hit a brick wall when I learned that Charlottesville City Schools don’t support MySQL. [...]