Monday, August 30, 2010

New ACT Light Rail website

Websites come and websites go. One thing which is certain is that technology marches forward, and sometimes those out on the trailing edge of technology get caught out. The ACT Light Rail website is hosted using Wordpress, but the version of Wordpress we have been using has become outdated and difficult to maintain.  
The old ACT Light Rail website front page.

If you go to our url you will see that we have now upgraded our Wordpress version, and in the next few weeks we will be putting up our new website with the new theme, and with updates on ACT Light Rail lobbying and activities which have occurred since August 2009. Embarrassingly, thats the last time the old website was upgraded. 

Fortunately, our old website has been stored for posterity at the National Library of Australia's 'Pandora' project, and will be linkable into the foreseeable future. Public transport lobbying can be  hard slog at times, but i'm glad that the effort that we have put into keeping the idea of light rail in the public mind , and the corporate knowledge of that lobbying effort will be available for future public transport lobbyists to use.

UPDATE: (from Jonathon Reynolds) The previous iteration of the website was created using a very old version of the Open Source CMS platform Joomla 1.3 that had been highly customised and was showing stability issues and proving very difficult to add to and maintain (hence the hiatus in article online). Several attempts had been made to successfully migrate the data intact to the latest version of Joomla but to no avail. A decision was finally made to bite the bullet and start again using Wordpress 3.x which should offer higher data integrity, stability and security.

If you have suggestions on what you would like to see on the new website, please leave a comment. 

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