news | versions

This page provides a short summary of earlier versions of this site and highlights what worked & what did not!

It has been updated for v5.1

Site v5.0 home page from 21 Dec 2020

Summary

The approaching Drupal v9 upgrade, in theory was a much easier migration than all before - it was also a time to review progress. It had not been good overall in terms of site content. Regular software updates eg closing potential security issues, the need to make changes on the development site and then upload changes to the live site became barriers to progress. [In Drupal 7 the content edits were applied on the live site!]

Some internal htm-php-database sites had recently been developed - they have been simple to create, update and workded well. In the end - this was the chosen technology option - losing some functions but gaining more control,simpler processes and easier routes to update. There is also a proven way to recreate some of the lost tools

New CSS frameworks have also helped as well as several web tools over the last decade eg Leaflet Map API and Mapbox serving OpenStreetMap.

This was the prefrered option going forward.

The hosting plaform, since mid 2018, has been with Krystal - who have benn excellent [there is no comparison with 123-Reg and we should have moved sooner].

Stats

Site v4 home page from Feb 2019

Summary

The migration from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 was a painful experience. This was because Drupal 8 was a different beast from the prevous version. From this point on the software was managed by configuration management packages, principally php-composer & several supporting tools.

While migration modules were provided this change offered an opportunity to redesign the site and it was decided to start from a clean sheet [again] and applying lessons learnt. Existing material was used as far as possible. Overall it worked well.

Stats

Site v3 home page from Oct 2018

Summary

Another [internal] site had been established using Drupal 7 and it was working well - followin a very steep learing curve. Drupal has a multi-site capability ie it is possible to configure more than one website based on the same software. Each site requires its own database.

We soon ran into hosting issues when the site locked everyone out - it happened often and the hosting provider [123-Reg] claimed that the database disc space had been exceeded - even though the internal size was just a few Mb.

Of course upgrading the hosting package helped the problem - but that cost. We lost confidence in 123-Reg from this point onwards.

Stats

Summary

The Serif WebPlus software remained fragile - there was no CSS. The html page output was overly simple, mostly fragments: text segmemts, colour bars, and images.

While the site content grew, to its highest level of content so far - but it was difficult to see a development path forward with this approach. This was due to the site content being locked in the proprietary workfile and the html [fragments] could not sensibly be reused. By now a second site, mapping-related, was being formulated ..... and the first rewrite of 3KH arrived on the horizon.

Stats

Site v1 home page from 23 Jan 2010

Summary

Serif WebPlus software was used ti create the fist site and it proved to be very fragile. An upgrade from X4 to X6 helped but lockups still remained though less frequently. This meant too-frequent backups and several hours of edit work were lost during that time.

The hosting platform was 123-Reg, files being uploaded by FileZilla. There was no problem with a small set of html pages.

Stats