So here goes... the obligatory 'We've just launched our new website' blog post. Its a mandatory requirement isn't it? ;)
------------------------------------------------------------------------ r6754 | adrian | 2009-07-07 16:28:32 +0100 (Tue, 07 Jul 2009) | 1 line created theme ------------------------------------------------------------------------
That was the first commit, by my colleague Adrian, around 15 months ago that broke the ground on this project. Our former website had served us well, and its design has stood the test of time over the past 7 years, but needed a refresh. Also the old site was using just plain Zope, not Plone and so the content management aspects were pretty rudimentary. The blog was added lated and used Xine, and was themed with an early version of XDV. The problem was is gathered a large amount of spam that had to be manually cleared from the moderation queue and crashed every week. Also, doing any kind of modification to the look and feel of Xine (ie adding Gravatar support) felt like hitting my head against a hard wall.
So why has it taken us so long to redevelop our own website then? Well many of you with sympathise with the proverb "The shoemaker's children are often shoeless". Well that's how we were... we were so busy developing websites for clients that our website always ended up on the back burner. Also we were very critical about what we wanted. We are our own worst client and changed our minds many times over the development. Not helped by the length of time we were working on it.
When we started, Plone 4 was still quite a long way off so we started the development on Plone 3 and used a number of add-ons such as Quills for the blogging. However we wanted to use the fantastic plone.app.discussion that Timo Stollenwerk has been working on. At the time that was still in early beta and we wanted to add Akismet support for spam checking. This lead to me doing various hacks, that even lead to a talk I did at the European Plone Symposium on Event Driven Programming in Plone. Luckily our development pace had some advantages as, in the meantime, Timo rewrote my hacks into a proper package to support Akismet in plone.app.discussion.
In the meantime we also started on the development of the Plone Conference 2010 website, which we start on in Plone 4 beta in order to 'eat our own dogfood'. Oh, what an absolute joy Plone 4 was to develop in. Everything I wanted to do was done nice and simply via the newer Zope 3 way of doing things. No longer was there the odd dichotomy of both the 'old' and 'new' ways of doing things. And it was fast. Very fast.
So one weekend I sat down and attempted to port our still-in-development Plone 3 site to Plone 4. Apart from the mess of add-ons and hacks I'd done for the blogging it all went very smoothly. This was partly precipitated by Dan Fairs switching his blog to Plone and using collective.blog.star for his blogging. And switching to that made my life a lot easier. The only issue I think we had switching from Plone 3 to Plone 4 was a few instances of variables that were no longer global, but they are explained very well in the Plone Upgrade Guide.
So now, not only do we have a nice modern design to the site which explains more concisely what we do, and has more information about the people that make up Netsight, but also has the most awesome live-search at the bottom of every page.
We have a great section to showcase our work and allows people to filter on particular project types. Over the past decade we have developed over 200 sites on top of Plone, this is just a selection of them, and we will be adding more of our previous projects as time allows.
So let us know what you think of the new site. There are probably still a few rough edges as we migrate old content and URLs over, but I'd like to take the time to thank all of the Netsight team that have been involved in the development of this site.