I am pleased to announce phase one of the Mount Sutro site upgrade project is complete. In addition to making updates to my original code, some of which has not been changed in some time, the content management system used to power articles, comments, search and feed functions was given an overhaul.

In February 2005, I released the last major version of the site which introduced WordPress as the new CMS. To make everything work just right, I merged the existing site into the WordPress application. It worked very well and was relatively easy to implement, one of the reasons I initially selected the product.

Several weeks later, the next major version of WordPress was released introducing among other things, a new template theme system. A short time later, I attempted to upgrade but the changes I had made when migrating to WordPress were eliminated by the new version. Rather than redo everything, I let it go with the intent of revisiting the issue in the near future.

Nearly three years later, lightning finally struck early in the morning on Saturday, 20 January 2008 and the long overdue project began. Here’s a summary of the new and updated features.

• When viewing articles in groups—that is, not individually—links for older and newer articles allow page by page reading in chronological order.
• When viewing articles individually, links for the previous and following article are available along with a new RSS feed for the article’s comments.
• The Article Archive window has been reorganized in part to give greater visibility to our feeds, including another new feed that consolidates all article comments.
• When you search for something, the results are highlighted and boldfaced so you can find your keywords more quickly.
• Permanent article URLs are abbreviated to exclude index.php. Do not worry about your existing links; they redirect automatically.

       http://www.mountsutro.org/index.php/2004/04/   ← Old Format
       http://www.mountsutro.org/2004/04/   ← New Format

• New pagination features mean the prohibition on viewing articles by year, month or day is lifted. For example, the sample URL above displays all articles published in April 2004.
• New default typefaces for improved readability include Microsoft’s Segoe UI for most site text and Consolas for fixed-width applications.
• With the free Akismet plug-in, comment filtration is greatly improved. After a period of observation, I may elect to relax the current moderation policy and permit instant comment posting.

I still have quite a bit of work to do under the hood for phase two, but I do not anticipate any more plainly visible changes. Please let me know what you think and if you find anything broken.

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