About the Festival Website

This page describes a little about the festival website.

Back in 2004 (the dark ages) the festival website was created using hand-crafted HTML. Although this worked, it had problems. Duncan's availability was a bottle-neck getting updates on the website and as the festival grew so did the effort required to look after the website. This was not sustainable!

The next step used MoinMoin, which is a Wiki technology and was introduced for the 2008 festival. This allowed any registered user to update the content which worked brilliantly as Mike C took on a huge chunk of the authoring. The key problems were that the website looked very clunky, that Wiki markup is scary to 'normal' people and that the lack of a page structure made site navigation a challenge even for people who knew what they were looking for. Despite the problems, the festival website used MoinMoin right up till Autumn 2009!

One of the reasons MoinMoin was used for so long was that although alternative website technologies were evaluated and Duncan even went as far as fully populating the new pages in both 2008 and 2009, he chickened out from making the new stuff go live because concerns that the risk was too high to roll-out.

The chief alternative was Joomla which is a very powerful and mature content management system. While it looks like Joomla is the answer to all the website challenges facing the festival, actually it was a bit of a nightmare. Changing the look of the website was a real pig as Joomla produces HTML that cannot easily be targetted with CSS - changing the logo is stupidly difficult and you should never ever have to hack core PHP just to get a something looking right. Then there is the horrendous site structure where a page is not a page but a recipe for creating a page; this leads to massive setup complexity just to get the page content where you want it. Creating a new page or tweaking a menu was not something for the faint hearted! And the final nail in the coffin was significant concerns over performance, the new website ran like a dog.

Fortunately, Summer of 2009 brought a new contender to the scene - MODx. Their designers say "In the end, our frustrations got the better of us. We gave up our search and resolved to do the right thing for us and for our clients. Some systems had parts but not all. Out of necessity, we built the tool we needed and decided to share it with the world. Based on the hundreds of thousands of downloads from all over the world, apparently we weren't the only ones with the same frustrations." - darn straight! Easy to set up, easy to theme, easy to manage and is super speedy. It's a breath of fresh air and so far has given no trouble what so ever! The only problem that happened at the roll-out was menu problems under IE6, and was caused by some inept Javascript written by Duncan and is nothing to do with MODx!

The gallery is currently an implementation of Coppermine. It's server based and is rather good apart from the gallery structure being fixed; I'd like to base our galleries on image tags. There are a couple of alternatives that are integrated with MODx including one that does tagged galleries, so this may change soon....

The festival website has been hosted by 34SP since Dec 2003. Their rates are very reasonable and their support (when we have needed it) has been absolutely brilliant. Nuff said!