Standish Wiki

From Standish Wiki

This is the Standish Wiki, a wiki for, and about, the township of Standish. It was started in October 2007 from the merger of the Standish Homepage and Standish History websites, both created by Steve Bradburn. The content of the two former sites was transferred to this wiki, for the first time allowing the site to be developed via the community, both within and whthout Standish.

Former sites

The Standish Homepage

The Standish Homepage was created late in 1999, and went live on the 1st January 2000, bringing the township of Standish into the new millennium.

The site's early .SHTML format was rewritten in 2002 with a much improved interface and an XML backend, and in 2003 control was moved from XML files to a MySQL database.

One of the most visited past of the new design was the integration of the Standish Messageboard

By 2006 the interface was ready to be updated, but the size of the site (especially the backend Content Management features) meant that few changes were made, and the redesign in both 2006 and 2007 failed to get very far (despite many graphical demos and running prototypes). The need to rewrite so much backend code (on very limited time availability), and the requirement for frequent updates, meant that it was time to look at a new method to control the site.

Standish History

The Standish History site was created in 2003, following the launch of the redesigned Standish Homepage site. Its purpose was to bring the research of others, mainly the Standish Historical Society and Rev. Thomas Cruddas Porteus into a newer multimedia age. It served historical articles from XML data files, and initially had its own forum, which was eventually incorporated into the Standish Messageboard.

The site worked well, and even had it's own rudimentary public Content Management System but very, very few new submissions were made from outside sources, and the historical collection did not expand.

By 2006 the Standish History site was looking very old - its tables-based design was in desperate need of an update. rather than creating a new site, it was decided that any new Standish Homepage site would incorporate the History site, which would mean that only a single design was necessary. In fact all the data files were converted to be compatible with the Standish Homepage system. However, they would not be used without a new design for the Standish Homepage site, and that was often started but never completed.

Into 2007

A New Hope

Without a new design, both the Standish Homepage and the Standish History site were not going anywhere. With only a single developer and maintainer (also working with a large number of other sites) the design work always stalled when higher priorities interjected.

It became obvious that the only way to solve the second problem was to open up the site to a collaborative community-maintained system. The requirements could be reduced to four areas: the messageboard, an article publishing system, a gallery and a calendar.

The obvious system was a CMS such as Joomla or Dropal (or Nuke/PostNuke/Mambo). These were examined in some detail, but a system the fitted the requirements did not emerge. One problem was the existence of a quality design which would fit the site profile. Another was that the article system for community, commerce and history data never really seemed appropriate. Yellow pages-style heirachical tree systems existed, but were not ideal. These systems were OK for general use, but just did not fit the requirements.

What did fit the specific requirements for the History/Community/Commerce system was a wiki. Rudimentary wikis existed for CMS' like Joomla/Mambo and Drupal, but were neither feature-rich, nor could they be guaranteed to be maintained and improved.

Wiki?

The only wiki system that was guaranteed to both fit the full requirements and have a guaranteed future was MediaWiki, the software that ran Wikipedia. This free software would fulfill the requirements for the database, with features that would work well for all aspects (especially via the numerous extensions). Therefore the obvious choice was MediaWiki. The downside was that whilst this system is easy to install, it is complex to set up from the base installation into a fully featured wiki, with a fairly steep learning curve (unsurprising in such a feature-rich application.)

All for one and one for all

This meant that rather than a single application, the site was going to run as four separate applications, with a custom header (and footer) to brand the site, and a custom front page linking all four.

The Gallery system was a fairly easy choice from so many of the wonderful web 2.0 applications now available. The Standish Messageboard had always run phpBB, and the imminent arrival of phpBB v3 (Mount Olympus) was an ideal upgrade. 75% there!

The calendar system was, as always a problem. Google's Calendar app is superb, but is a seperate application, not an embedded app, and therefore a different system was required.

To be continued