Themaneater.com redesign

Posted to The Newsroom by Justin Myers at 1:02 p.m., Jan. 22, 2009

So, assuming you're not reading this via RSS feed, you can probably tell that the site looks a bit different today.

Over the past few months, we've been planning to migrate our site from the older, 0.96-based version of Django we've been running since February to the latest release (1.0.2) for a number of reasons, including additional security features, extensibility and ease of training. The problem, of course, is that you don't migrate a site with at least a decade's worth of content by patching it up in a couple of days.

There was already a fair amount of stuff the editorial board wanted to change or add at a bit of a deeper level than, say, just adding a new application like we did with the campus guide -- so we've been adding those new features at the same time.

Most of the changes in how the site works are on the back end (programming side), but we've obviously changed the design a bit and revised just about everything to run under one of a few common frameworks to simplify things and streamline future development -- which allowed us to more easily put together such things as the new photo browser I'll talk about in a second.

So, enough already -- what's the new stuff?

• The new design, of course, including an even more substantial redesign for MOVE Magazine.
• A larger photo browser to accompany every article and photo blog entry.
• A form linked from every article and blog entry to help you e-mail that content to other people.
• Another form to make it easier to send letters to the editor.
• Support for linking page layouts and their contents, though we've still got to link most of these.
• Expanded support for Twitter.
• A more detailed search function.
• More information about individual staffers and their contributions to the paper.
• Current weather conditions; we'll be adding forecasts later this semester.
• A calendar of upcoming events.

We've also got several more features currently in development, so be sure to check back periodically for those.

Thanks for coming to themaneater.com to get your news about MU and the community and world beyond; if you have any suggestions how to make the site more useful for you, be sure to let us know!