AMP: Artists' Meeting Place and Resource Collective

A new free resource helps smaller arts orgs customize websites

Adam Huttler, Fractured Atlas blog, 9/19/12

Many readers will already be familiar with Artful.ly, Fractured Atlas's cloud-based web app that empowers artists and arts organizations with tools for ticketing, donor management, and more. Artful.ly Open Source Edition (OSE) is the underlying engine that powers Artful.ly, and it is now freely available for anyone to download, use, modify, or extend. Why use Artful.ly OSE? Well, the truth is that, for 90% of independent artists and small organizations out there, Artful.ly is the better fit. It's quick, easy, and inexpensive. But for some of you, that's not enough. Your needs are unusual enough that one size decidedly doesn't fit all. What's more, you have the technical chops to set up a server or two and get your hands dirty with software code. It's for you that we offer Artful.ly OSE. Open sourcing our code is also a highly transparent process that engages distributed peer review which we believe will lead to better quality code, increased reliability, greater flexibility, a lower total cost of ownership, and freedom from predatory vendor lock-in. Now, a few of you may be thinking, "Hmm, haven't I heard this before?" and if this all sounds a bunch like ATHENA, that's because Artful.ly OSE is essentially the next generation of the ATHENA platform, with a couple of big changes: (1) ATHENA, somewhat notoriously, was designed without a user interface. We fell in love with the idea that arts organizations would develop their own UIs. Nifty idea, but, as we soon realized, totally unrealistic in practice. Artful.ly OSE, by contrast, has a lovely default user interface borrowed from Artful.ly itself. Of course, if you don't like it, you can change it however you want, which is still a lot easier than building one from scratch! (2) ATHENA was built in Enterprise Java, whereas Artful.ly OSE is a Ruby on Rails web application. (If you don't have any idea what that means, then you're probably a better candidate for the hosted Artful.ly app.) We believe Ruby on Rails is a better fit for the arts community. It's lightweight yet powerful and designed from scratch for the web.

from LA Culture Net