The BackOffice application is built on top of industry standard software. As as result, it benefits from a large community with sources of shared knowledge, support and complementary tools. To run BackOffice you only need to be running one of the popular implementations of the Appache web server, MySQL database and PHP scripting language. This is easily obtainable for a standalone implementation on a single Windows, Linux or Mac (OSX) system. Simply download the latest version of WAMP, LAMP or MAMP, depending on your OS of choice and you are almost there. For cloud-based implementations, many hosting companies already support the xAMP combination or it can be uploaded and applied to a remote server. Many thousands of websites and applications are built on the xAMP tools.
The BackOffice application itself was implemented using the Grocery CRUD* framework which is in turn based on CodeIgniter. Each implementation of BackOffice includes a copy of the database schema, the source files (.php, .html, .css, …) so that each community can modify it if necessary. Many of the fields are easy to configure based on your specific community. For example, you can use “Mixed” in the place of “Coed” if that is how you have been labelling your weekends. There are standard reports available through the application menu but additional reports can always be created using standard MySQL SELECT statements, etc.
These software tools were chosen because they allow 4th Dat communities to modify their BackOffice implementation if they require something not in the base system. In addition, as Open Source tools, they do not add anything to the total cost of running BackOffice.
* “CRUD” may not sound appealing but it is an acronym for Create, Retrieve, Update, Delete. It describes in one short word the basic functions most database / application combinations need to support.