A New Redesigned Website Coming Soon For The Linux Rain (Beta)
By Andrew Powell, published 17/07/2014 in Announcements
That's right folks, there's some changes afoot here at The Linux Rain. A CMS migration and redesign of the site is in the works right now and a beta version will be available shortly!
The change comes on the back of me feeling that a change in CMS (Content Management System) was needed in order to streamline some things as well as easily add some features that would be much more time consuming or very difficult in the existing CMS, KirbyCMS.
Don't get me wrong, Kirby is fantastic. As a file-based CMS, it's incredibly simple to work with and maintain, especially (obviously) as it contains no actual SQL database. Just files and folders.
Still, here as The Linux Rain grows, some extra features such as a user/login system is needed. i.e for authors. To implement such a thing in Kirby would take much time. Whereas, Wordpress, which is the CMS I have chosen, has such a system out-of-the-box. For all it's extra complexity and, shall we say, more delicate maintenance, Wordpress is a very popular and well established system that has a plethora of plugins available. So it seems a logical progression.
The Linux Rain: Reloaded
With a new Content Management System, also means a new website design. Well, it doesn't have to mean a new design. But I figure, if I have to rebuild the old theme from (mostly) scratch to migrate the CMS, then I may as well give the site a facelift in the process as well.
Some points about the new Linux Rain functionality and theme:
- Custom theme written from scratch with the help of Bootstrap.
- Totally responsive.
- Modern typography and colour scheme designed for maximum readability. The colour scheme is heavily based on Solarized Light by Ethan Schoonover.
- No more Disqus required for comments! Unless people actually want it... in which case I could consider offering multiple commenting options. But my impression is a fair amount of people find Disqus to be a turn-off.
- Proper user system which will allow authors in particular to have more power and options at their disposal, not to mention automatic subscription to any comments on their articles. This was a big limitation on the current site, with Disqus especially.
The website has been developed and actually already running the latest articles in parallel with the current website. There's a sneak peak in this article's header image at the top if you hadn't already noticed!
All that remains, is for the site to actually be uploaded and accessible on the internet. As such, very soon you will be able to try out the new "Linux Rain". Likely it will run in a sub-domain for the time being, something like beta.linuxrain.com. I will post an update when the new beta is ready and live.
I will most welcome any opinions or suggestions on the new site when it's active and of course, as a beta, there may be some bugs or inconsistencies to solve.