CWIS Frequently Asked Questions

The Collection Workflow Integration System (CWIS, pronounced SEE-wis) is a free, open source software package designed to help assemble, organize, and share information about resources online.  The software conforms to international and academic standards for metadata while providing turnkey setup and a user-friendly interface, allowing resource collection developers (and end users) to focus on what they want to share (or find) without worrying about the technical details.  CWIS was developed by Internet Scout with support from the National Science Foundation.

If you're interested in helping people find your online resources, CWIS will allow you to create and share detailed information about those resources quickly and effectively.  CWIS provides extensive support for cataloging resources with standardized metadata, which can then be automatically shared via an array of channels out to the larger Internet community, helping others find your work.

CWIS is free for non-commercial use.  (If you want to use CWIS or the CWIS code as part of a for-profit venture, please contact Internet Scout about licensing.)

In addition to the online help available within software, there is extensive developer documentation available via the Administration menu for those wishing to customize or extend their CWIS installation.

Like most free, open source software, CWIS is supported primarily by the user community.  If you need more extensive or dedicated support for using, customizing, or customizing CWIS, please contact Internet Scout and we can direct you toward some possible options.

CWIS is licensed under the GNU General Public License v2.0.  In a nutshell, the GPL v2 allows you to freely use, modify, and extend the software, as long as any new versions you distribute are licensed under the same terms.

Yes, CWIS is designed to play well with others (the Internet Scout web site is a CWIS/Drupal hybrid), and even includes plugins for keeping user accounts in sync with other open source packages like Drupal and phpBB.

CWIS is distributed with only an English-language interface, however because extensive effort has gone into separating the presentation (look and feel) of the software from the technical back end, it is not difficult to replace the distributed (English) text with equivalent text in other languages.

If you've found a potential problem with CWIS, please follow the steps on the Reporting a Bug page.  If you have an idea for an enhancement to the software, please post it in the appropriate CWIS forum -- someone may already have implemented it!

CWIS is designed to run in the LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) environment available on most web servers.  More specifically, CWIS requires PHP version 5.1 or newer and MySQL 5.0 or newer.  CWIS will also run well on a MAMP (Mac/Apache/MySQL/PHP) server.  Both LAMP and MAMP systems are used for CWIS development.

Although there are some groups running CWIS on a Windows server, Microsoft Windows is not a supported operating environment for CWIS.

CWIS requires less than 100MB of disk space, plus whatever may be needed to store files you upload to your CWIS-based site.

Root access is not necessary to install or run CWIS.

CWIS does an integrity check during installation, to make sure all necessary files are present and intact.  Checksum errors encountered during install are usually because the files have been uploaded to the web server via FTP using "ASCII" or "Automatic" mode.  Make sure your FTP client is configured to use "Binary" mode when uploading files to your server.

As long as you follow the guidelines in the CWIS Developer Documentation (available via the Administration menu on your CWIS site), your customizations will be preserved when upgrading to a new version of CWIS.  (Minor edits to customized files may sometimes be required when upgrading to accomodate new functionality, though the CWIS development team tries to avoid this wherever possible.)

Yes, the metadata schema (information fields) in CWIS are completely customizable.  You can add as many fields as you like to describe each resource, using 14 basic metadata field types:  Text, Paragraph (longer text), URL, Number, Date, Timestamp, Flag (boolean), Tree (hierarchical), Controlled Name (large controlled vocabulary), Option (small controlled vocabulary), User, File, Image, Point.  More specialized basic types like URL or Timestamp have added functionality associated with them to make the information more useful.

CWIS is designed to allow the look and feel of a CWIS-based site to be customized with a minimum of effort, and for those customizations to be able to be applied on a per-user basis. Toward this end the PHP internals of the software have been carefully separated out from the HTML, PHP, and CSS code that produces the rendered web pages.  Detailed information about how to create a custom interface is available in the CWIS Developer Documentation, but the process in brief is:  1) identify which file contains the bit of the interface you want to change,  2) make a local copy of the file and edit it to effect the desired change, and  3) switch the user interface in System Configuration to load your new file.  Often all that's required is a text editor and some basic knowledge of HTML and/or CSS.

If you just want to change the look and feel of your CWIS site, then you're probably better off adding a new user interface (theme), but if you want to add a specific feature or modify a bit of CWIS functionality, then a plugin may be the right choice.  Plugins are a way of modifying existing functionality or adding new functionality to your CWIS installation, without having to modify the CWIS code itself. They are written in PHP and, once placed in the correct location, are loaded and run automatically by CWIS at the appropriate time.  More information about creating CWIS plugins can be found in the CWIS Developer Documentation.