Pauly site: redux

A few years ago, when I was still a member of the Jozef Pauly ensemble from Ekeren, at some point I took over maintaining their website. One of the things I did was converting it to drupal, mainly because that would allow other members of the ensemble to help maintaining it.

Of course, such things do not happen automatically; and had I spent some more time on the project, it might've actually worked. But I didn't, so it didn't. Oh well.

One of the main issues with the site as I set it up, was that I hadn't really done a very good job integrating everything. The standard drupal 5 theme looked pretty good, I thought. Slap on a few modules, and done. Unfortunately, I skipped a bit of testing, and as a result, the site didn't really function the way it should've. When this became apparent, I didn't have the time to properly fix it.

During the last few years that I was a member of the ensemble, someone else stepped up to help maintain it. I told him that one of the things that I wanted to do was to upgrade the site to Drupal 6, so as to make i18n a bit easier. But some of the modules which weren't in drupal core made this somewhat harder than needed, and I didn't have the time to investigate in-depth what the issues were.

In the end, I set up a secondary site on a different vhost on the same server that ran drupal6, and gave that guy admin rights there to help convert things to the new site. I planned to lead the effort to make things work; but when I came back not so much later, it turned out that he'd done a very good job already, and that it was probably a good idea to let him finish.

This took much, much longer than expected; but eventually, he's finalized the setup, and it's now live (since a few weeks) on their official site.

This site has content in both Dutch and English, though there is slightly more in the Dutch version: since they're doing a concert trip again this year, there's a blog for their families. Also, some people individually have decided to blog about the whole thing, too, which is... interesting.

At any rate, I think the site looks very, very cool. Go check it out!

I guess we may have to start thinking about doing an upgrade to Drupal 7 some time soon. But, hey.