ISPreview.co.uk Gets a New Lick of Paint

Regular readers might well notice that our front page and news format have changed over the weekend. This change represents the first stage of our phased and quite complicated migration over to a new Content Management System (CMS), which has become a necessity for us because the old system was no longer being updated and didn’t allow for future flexibility.

The reason for this message is to apologise for any disruption that our work might cause. It’s a difficult process and we’ve already had a mountain of problems to contend with (the eagle eyed among you might have noticed the new design appearing briefly last week, before we had to take it offline again) but so far so good.

All of the old content is being left as it is because we can’t directly migrate that to the new system, it would just cause too many problems. So we’ll be starting the new site with articles from the past week (note that at present this change only affects our news and none of the other sites systems or services), although the old news is still searchable and available through the News Archives page. If you bookmarked any articles then nothing has changed and we’ve today redirected the old news feed to our new one, so RSS subscribers should still be fine (we hope).

The new system isn’t quite as fast (but we will work on that) because it can do a lot more than the old one and I hope everybody likes what we’ve come up with, but no doubt it’ll need some tweaking along the way and others might have trouble getting use to it (we have tried to keep a familiar format). So don’t be surprised if the site is a little disrupted over the next few days.

As a final note I should say that ISPreview v3.5, as we call it, was designed with modern web browsers in mind and works best on IE9, Chrome and Firefox v3+ (we developed it on all three and some Opera testing too). It won’t have too many problems on Internet Explorer v8 (IE8) either but you do lose some of the CSS3 styling, which makes the site look a lot nicer when enabled. IE7 works too but you will notice a few format problems, which couldn’t be helped as IE7 does not fully respect web standards.

One downside is that we no longer display full news articles on our front page (if possible we’ll make an option to do this) and have instead opted for a summary. There are several reasons for this, not least with keeping the database load under control and, more importantly, keeping the total front page size down (i.e. showing lots of big images to readers on one page wasn’t so good for our more rural readers and their slower connections).