Central Unit blogs

I’ve just implemented a substantial rebuild of PAStexplorers to keep our Education Officer happy. It now resides on a Textpattern platform, and uses a range of plugins developed by the open source community; therefore creating a more powerful mini – CMS that will allow her to edit the content at will. This should therefore free up more of my time to do stuff with various other projects.

The website is now fully functional at www.pastexplorers.org.uk and now features:

1. Download section – counter, file size and filename displayed on screen. You are also free to download the village and backpack files as zips for your own non-commercial use…
2. AJAX livesearch installed
3. Section for case studies which now needs some content
4. Images of children and staff using the resources
5. Examples of children’s work
6. Clean URLs using apache’s mod rewrite functionality – should be easier for Cei to recite URLs now.
7. Custom error pages
8. Contact form for feedback and queries (anti spam – there’s some nasty people out there you know.)
9. Events section – submit your events through the contact form and Cei will make use of them here

I’ve now got to update the old site’s htaccess file to redirect people to the new site and links so that we don’t get penalised by the search engines. I can now more easily track visitors as well on this platform, and therefore provide DCMS/BM target information. Final things that will need doing are code validation and CSS validation to ensure web standards compliance – very important that this is achieved…..