About the Website
External Website Links
The BC Cancer Research Centre website provides links to other websites as a service to those who visit our site. The BC Cancer Research Centre is not responsible for the information provided on other web sites.
Website Guide
Department Colour Coding
The BCCRC website is organized in a way that mirrors the research groups within our centre. Pages are organized into nine sections according to research department, and these pages are colour-coded.
| | Administration and Services |
| | Advanced Therapeutics |
| | Cancer Control Research |
| | Cancer Endocrinology |
| | Cancer Genetics and Developmental Biology |
| | Cancer Imaging |
| | Genome Sequence Centre |
| | Medical Biophysics |
| | Terry Fox Laboratory |
Research Profiles and Publications
Each member of our team at the BC Cancer Research Centre has a Research Profile page. To find a specific person, consult the research centre personnel list.
Many people (especially our senior scientists, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students) have a list of their publications online. To find publications for a specific individual, see the research centre publications list.
Employment & Training Information
If you are seeking information about current job openings, or opportunities for postdoctoral fellows and graduate students, visit the Training Opportunities page.
Questions or Suggestions?
If you have any questions about the BC Cancer Research Centre, the research we perform, or our website, please let us know! You will find links to submit comments on every page.
Building and Maintaining this Website
A Content Management System
A custom content management system (CMS) was developed with the following features:
- Content Management through the browser All website editing is performed using existing web browsers by calling CGI scripts. Although editing works with
Netscape, several enhanced features are possible with Internet Explorer.
- No knowledge of HTML is necessary Anyone can edit pages, even if they don't know HTML (although they can insert HTML tags if they want to). Most formatting is done automatically.
- Authentication and Authorization The CMS allows pages to be edited only by people with the required authorization. Authentication is done by leveraging the existing WinNT domain password system.
- Everyone can edit All 350+ employees at the BC Cancer Research Centre can edit their own pages from their own desktop computer.
Open Source Tools
Open source tools like Perl and XML were used extensively in the construction of this website.
The CMS is written entirely in Perl. In addition to the 415kB of code I wrote, I found the following Perl modules extremely useful:
- HTML::Template - for separating content from styles (or, rather, for merging them)
- XML::Parser - for parsing all the content
- CGI - for 1001 things, including easy form parsing
- Net::SMTP - for sending out automated emails to the 350+ editors
- Time::HiRes - for benchmarking
- Digest::MD5 - for encrypting session cookies
- Image::Size - for automating length and width attributes on image tags
- Tree::Nary - for storing the heirarchical site map
- LWP::UserAgent - for fetching data off the net
- GD - for generating images on the fly
- Win32::AuthenticateUser - for tying into the WinNT domain password system
All content for the BCCRC website is stored as a set of flat XML files. While it may be more efficient to store content in a MySQL database, I find the use of XML files to be very convenient. With XML::Parser, parsing the files is a snap. And although editing is done entirely through a browser, it is nice to be able to open the XML data files in a text editor for a quick look.
The website is generated by reading in the XML content, parsing it, applying formatting, and wrapping it with a website template. This process takes a few seconds for the whole site.
I use Emacs to do my text editing. Although the learning curve for emacs takes a few days, it is well worth it (even though my colleagues bug me about pressing Alt-Meta-Shift-Ctrl-X do execute commands).
Total cost of the software for developing the system
Combining the cost of emacs, with the costs of XML, Perl, and a web browser gives a total software cost to build the system of $0. Yes, that's right... every tool I used to build the site was absolutely free.
Did you find any of this interesting? Want to know more? 
Drop me a line, or head over to my research profile page to see what I do for my day job.
Andrew Dlugan
Webmaster - BCCRC
Comments/Questions about this page?