Live!

My brother and me, we've been maintaining the website for the Jozef Pauly Ensemble since a few years. I'd written some stuff in PHP so that a few things could be automated, but it wasn't much more than a glorified SSI setup, with a random picture at the home page, a calendar page that would automatically strike out past events, and some semi-homebrewn language negotiation support based on my accept-to-gettext.inc file that I wrote a few years ago (and which apparently has become quite popular in the mean time—even with the bug in that it requires you to set a charset, which is totally unnecessary).

I had tried to set it up so that people could easily modify the site: everything was stored in subversion, and I made people use TortoiseSVN to make a checkout, explaining them how to safely use it, and providing a bunch of page templates, but that was still too difficult.

Over the past year, I've been off and on working on replacing the whole setup with something based on Drupal, and today we've gone live. It's nothing too spectacular—just the default theme with some non-default colors and a few extra non-default modules—but at least I won't be the bottleneck for doing updates anymore; and stuff which used to run separately (forum, guest book, a few other things) are now nicely integrated into the main site.

Isn't that nice.