The WGBH.org Development Blog

Forgive me, Father, for it’s been 12 days since my last post, mainly because we’ve been very busy here at WGBH Online. The good news is all of that busy-ness has paid off because…

(drum roll please)

the WGBH.org rebuild has been completed! That’s right! Check her out.

Ok, I’m lying. It’s a lame attempt at an April Fools joke.

But I wasn’t lying about the being busy part. Busy we sure have been.

Since our last chat we now have our new development server up and running. With the help of IT I have configured a new development environment, where by core and contributed Drupal code is being downloaded from the Drupal CVS repository and managed locally in our new SVN repository.

Wheeeee!

Pete and I are now working away in this new environment. Pete is working at replicating the current look and feel and styles of WGBH.org in a WGBH theme. I’ve been porting the TV Programs and Schedules code that I had already written in Drupal 5 to Drupal 6.

Building on Drupal 6 has already proved to be an adventure (think Survivorman - but more dangerous), as we’re currently working with the HEAD versions of CCK and Views (and a few other modules). Needless to say, I’ve already had a few bang-my-head-against-the-wall moments with buggy code. But we will persevere!

Oh yeah and we’ve also decided (for now) to go with Zen Classic as our administration theme. I like the clean, plain simpleness of it. It’s also close to the look our of current CMS, so should be less of a shock to the systems of our content producers when they’re introduced to it. This choice, of course, is subject to change…

Meanwhile, IT continues to build out the new hardware and reconfigure the old hardware that will all be used for the new version of WGBH.org. Specification meetings continue apace and, oh yeah, we’re still looking for a project manager for the whole rebuild.

All that and Spring has sprung!

That’s about where we’re at.