Web sites changes

It’s been a long process but last night I have finally released changes to the content part of TripleWhiteFox.com that make management of it much easier. By “content part” I am referring to everything but the blog and forums.

My old way of maintaining the site was through hand-coded HTML that I updated through a text editor. This method goes way back to 1999 when I first started a web site and that was an accepted practice. These days it is not and, more importantly, it is a productivity barrier. When I started to use WordPress for my blog I got a taste for how nice it is to write content directly on the site. I wanted that across the whole thing.

So, back in November 2009 I started to explore software that could do that and settled on Drupal. It is a Content Management System (CMS). There are simpler CMS options but I have some dynamic content to integrate so I needed a lot of flexibility. Drupal has delivered that. The “content part” of the site is now running on it. I still have a few things to work out but it is pretty much there.

My next steps will be to move the blog from WordPress into Drupal and then finally convert the forums to a more up to date package.