01/03/2011
Began work on the new CMS design last month and so far we've made reasonable progress. I started out with quite a radical re-design but have decided to scale back with something a bit more simplistic and recognisable for the new front page style, largely because of a concern that existing users might have found the new layout too difficult navigate.
We'll also need time to adapt to the new technology and, with the old CMS being past its sell-by-date, I don't want to have to delay the new site due to a learning curve. As a result our new preliminary front-page will be very similar to the current one, albeit with new features and flexibility.
I hope to start work on the technology side this month, which will contain quite a steep learning curve as we'll need to find ways of bending the CMS to our way of doing things. I've also begun preliminary work on our future forum upgrade by testing the new vBulletin4's systems and styles.
Needless to say that the new vB is a mess of settings and a lesson in how giving too much control over too many things via an editor can make even simple tasks a lot more time consuming to perform. Jelsoft has also made the vB nav menus a lot more tedious to move around. We want a forum that plugs comfortably into our design without much hassle and it looks like vB4 can't do that without a lot of work. God only knows why they made it so tedious, vB3 was fine. By contrast vB4 just wants to dominate everything.
So.. back to work on articles, CMS and forum software. Behind the scenes 2011 will be a busy year.
Began work on the new CMS design last month and so far we've made reasonable progress. I started out with quite a radical re-design but have decided to scale back with something a bit more simplistic and recognisable for the new front page style, largely because of a concern that existing users might have found the new layout too difficult navigate.
We'll also need time to adapt to the new technology and, with the old CMS being past its sell-by-date, I don't want to have to delay the new site due to a learning curve. As a result our new preliminary front-page will be very similar to the current one, albeit with new features and flexibility.
I hope to start work on the technology side this month, which will contain quite a steep learning curve as we'll need to find ways of bending the CMS to our way of doing things. I've also begun preliminary work on our future forum upgrade by testing the new vBulletin4's systems and styles.
Needless to say that the new vB is a mess of settings and a lesson in how giving too much control over too many things via an editor can make even simple tasks a lot more time consuming to perform. Jelsoft has also made the vB nav menus a lot more tedious to move around. We want a forum that plugs comfortably into our design without much hassle and it looks like vB4 can't do that without a lot of work. God only knows why they made it so tedious, vB3 was fine. By contrast vB4 just wants to dominate everything.
So.. back to work on articles, CMS and forum software. Behind the scenes 2011 will be a busy year.