Back in 2001 I spent a month in reserva Los Cedros up in the cloud forest in the Andes of Ecuador. I decided the most helfpul thing I could do as a volunteer at the reserve was make a website. Most helpful, not most fun. They didn’t have a website and these things are you know important. So I did. There was a laptop up there and a early implementation of a digital camera, and I banged away with HTML and a lot of tables. Since then I’ve added links to a gallery-run gallery and a blogger-run blog, and hooked up a new email system, but basically the website has never changed. They still routinely get people coming to the reserve who read about it on the website. The website which looked creaky when I made it in 2001.

So it’s well and truly time for a new design. And since I was making a new site, which may well end up lasting another 6 years, I figured I should probably try and build a strong infrastructure which would let non-techies write and upload content directly. And it should be language-aware since we’ve been talking for years about making the site as multilingual as the reserve’s occupants.

So I needed a Content Management System. My experience making the Sea-to-Sky Freenet website back in 2003 with webGUI was that CMSs were kind of clunky and frustrating. (That damn site is still running too.) But I figured that a 4 years is a lot in the open-source world, and the landscape should be different now.

I’ve been spending some time on the site every day for a couple of weeks now and I have some thoughts. I will try and write some of them down in subsequent posts.