Website development

Welcome to the third iteration of the Structural Informatics Group website. We developed our first version of the website shortly after the web began, around 1995. This was all done using hand-coded html. Around the mid-2000's I used Drupal to create a new version of the website, initially in Drupal 6, then upgrading to Drupal 7. I was planning to upgrade yet again to Drupal 8 since Drupal 7 will reach end of life in January 2025. However, everything I read suggested it would be very painstaking to move to Drupal 8. Also, although Drupal 7 allows the creation of very nice content management systems (CMS), I found it difficult to customize the behavior of the system since the program code is scattered throughout the site, and is written in PhP. I was also influenced by this blog entry by Andre Baryudin, who describes his process of moving away from Drupal to Wagtail Moving from Drupal to Django Wagtail

Thus, I began looking for alternate programming and website development tools, finally settling on Wagtail , which is a CMS based on Django, a python web-development framework. Some of the main reasons I chose Wagtail were:

• Since I am currently the only one working this site I needed to concentrate on a single programming language. I chose python for the same reason many others have chosen it.
• I want to be able to easily drop down to python as I need to customize the site to go beyond pure content management.

The tradeoff in using Wagtail is that it requires a lot of programming expertise (at least at this point). But that was OK with me since I want to program.

The actually process of moving the drupal website to a new Wagtail site involved exporting the data from drupal in Json format, creating data models in Wagtail that corresponded to the implicit models I was using in Drupal, and writing python scripts to parse the json exports and populate the Wagtail models.

I also learned enough CSS and Bootstrap to enable me to make the site easier to navigate (I think) than the drupal site. The result is the current website.

The key change that a user will note is that it is easier to find the working services by clicking icons on the home page. Other than that there is not much new information, but the new site now provides a solid basis for further development.

For reference here are the first two website. There is still information in these websites that I want to incorporate in the new wagtail site:

• First, manually generated site
• Drupal 7 site