NEWS | December 2020-1

Until now ..

Another version & the 5th of a series. For a number of reasons progress has been limited over the last 24 months - but it is hope that this approach will speed things up. For anyone interested there is an article outlining threekitchenhill versions since the first in 2009 here.
In summary - the previous versions:

1. A short lived site based on html pages
2. A redesigned html site - perhaps with the greatest level of content so far [with topics like walks]
3. A new CMS based site intended to recover all content from v2 and more
4. A forced CMS software migration. Adopted an improved design. An increase in family homes on site but little else.

Whilst the CMS [content management system] is very powerful, has many options and is extensively used - it's popularily now means that configuration management and security have become big issues.

This leads to frequent updates (on average every 6 weeks) which required updating the software for both the development and lives sites - and required several hours of attention.

As a result less time was available to work on content. Beyond this user extensions using CMS require a lot of work to develop and test and some tools (like dynamic maps) are still limited.

Going forward ..

Much has happened in the web world over the last decade with new standards [html & css developments] and tools [eg css themes] and this now offer improved possibilities. Part of the challenge has been starting from a low knowledge base and improving version on version by investing lessons learnt each time.

With family sites there is an additional and not wholly solved requirement to communicate an overview of relationships and it does not get more complex thana family tree!

Spring 2021

With this new framework new pages can be added as they are prepared. Therefore it is hoped that a small number of items can be added each month to help grow the site back to and beyond the original content levels.

The test pages will be used to trial new and different approaches - especially maps and visualising the connections of groups of people.

Next planned update: End January 2021