2017/2018 Upgrade

After retaining the same basic design since around 2003, the Whiteparish Community Website is long overdue for a major overhaul, most of which we hope to tackle during the back end of 2017 and (probably the whole of) 2018. The main stages of this upgrade will be :

• Ensure all content of existing site is relevant.
• Ensure all links are working.
• Migrate entire site to run in a different technical environment on an "Apache" server.
• Include facilities for organisations to update their own pages.
• Spend unimaginable amounts of time debugging!
• Launch new site to ringing applause (or indifference!)

 
Some of these stages are dealt with in a little more detail under the following headings.

Relevance

Perhaps not just a case of ensuring "Relevance"; but also "Usefulness". Running a community website involves some interesting decisions, one of which is the extent to which it should be a historical record–not only of things happening in and to the village, but also of what material was added to or changed in the website itself. In the new website, happily some of those decisions will not be ours, because organisations will be responsible for their own content, and either keep old stuff or not as they choose. But there will still be decisions to be made about whether or not the rest of the content (the stuff that is not controlled by any of the village organisations) should be retained or dropped. One easy decision is to drop the original pre-2003 version of whiteparish.co.uk. Retaining this for a year or two after we took over the domain might have been sensible, but to keep this material 14 years later definitely isn't.

There will be some reorganising, too.

Links

There are literally hundreds of links on the website, many of them to other websites over which we have no control, resulting in a fair number of broken links. We know how these can erode website visitors' confidence in the quality of the site as a whole. So we will fix these before migrating the site; and run regular checks once the new site is up and running to minimise the problem in the future.

Migration

New HTML; New CSS; New Responsive Design

The existing website was hand-coded in an unholy mixture of several different versions of HTML 4, lots of HTML-coded tables (nowadays frowned on), and occasionally some CSS 2. Back in 2003 quite a lot of people were still using PCs or laptops with what today would be thought of as low-resolution screens, such as 800 x 600 or even 640 x 480 pixels. The i-phone was still four years away. Nearly all websites were designed in a "one-size fits all" way, with a standard pixel width. And this one was no exception.

Today of course you can view websites on a very wide variety of different devices, from smartphones to desktop PCs with widescreen displays. The updated website will therefore join the modern trend towards "responsive design", which refers to website pages being able to adapt themselves to the screen size, and other characteristics, of the device they are being viewed on. The pages will be built with recent versions of HTML and CSS (versions 5 and 3, respectively) which have features specifically designed to enable this sort of adaptablility. At this stage it's impossible to say exactly what screen sizes we will cater for, but eventually it will certainly be more flexible than before. (Which sets the bar intentionally low!)

Converting the website coding to these new versions of HTML and CSS will probably be a nightmare, but worth it. Fortunately there are plenty of software tools on the web to help ease the pain.

New Platform

The existing website runs on a Microsoft Windows web server, uses a server-side scripting language called ASP, and has some databases written in Microsoft Access. This set of basically Microsoft technologies is considered by many to be inferior to a competitive set, based on "open-source" technologies. These comprise the Apache web server (and close relatives), PHP server-side scripting language, and MySQL databases. About four times as many websites are hosted on Apache servers compared to Microsoft ones, which brings advantages, apart from anything else, in getting support. If you're using the open-source technologies and need help, you're likely to get quicker answers to any problems you might post on the internet, because there are many more experts on the open-source technologies than on the Microsoft ones,

Drupal

As well as switching the Community Site to a more popular set of open-source web technologies. We will also probably be switching to "Drupal", a website-building/supporting environment which runs ON the open-source stuff already mentioned. To quote Wikipedia, "Drupal is a free and open-source content-management framework written in PHP". Using Drupal will enable village organisations to easily submit their own content to the website and edit it. It should also allow us to include other new features, notably a discussion board, using facilities that "come with" Drupal.

Latest update: 1 June 2017.

A Timecheck

Any very observant visitors who have glanced through this page before may notice that the target dates all seem to have slipped by a couple of years. Yes, they have, but we'll try to keep to the new targets!