History

The current website was developed in response to certain shortcomings in the existing website.

A previous project to implement a website using Zope was eventually abandoned when resource usage became a problem.

An attempt was made by Tim Retout to clean up the existing code, but it eventually became clear that major restructuring was desired, in any case.

Minutes of some early meetings to discuss the new project are archived at http://retout.co.uk/2006/website/.

Problem

The previous website suffered from a few problems:

  1. Maintainability
  2. Efficiency - lack of mod_perl
  3. Authentication - multiple accounts with different passwords
  4. Style - both in visual appearance and structure

However, the functionality did address our needs.

Aim

To solve the above problems in the previous website.

Method

To solve each of the above problems (struck out lines have been accomplished):

  1. Abstraction - appropriate use of object orientation will result in more maintainable code. Use of Catalyst as a framework should speed up development.
  2. mod_perl - once the code is maintainable, it can be ported to mod_perl for greater speeds.
  3. LDAP - if we set up an LDAP server, we can have consistent authentication across anything that supports it.
  4. CSS - instead of excessive browser detection, have a single theme that degrades gracefully. (And reordering the structure is simple to do, with Apache directives to keep all the old URLs working.)