Posted by Steve on Thu 23 Dec 2004 at 19:52
The Debian Administration website has undergone a facelift since yesterday, changing to a more maintainable CSS based layout and adding additional new features.
The Debian Administration website is based upon the YAWNS project by Denny. The acronym stands for "Yet Another Weblog News System".
When it was time to setup the site I knew that I wanted some kind of Slashdot-like feel, however I didn't need the overhead of running a full slashcode installation.
There were many available applications for managing articles, users, and comments but many of them were riddled with security issues or tricky to modify. By contrast Yawns was cleanly written and simple to update.
The code behind the site has gradually diverged from the original software in several areas, and now the templates have been re-written to be based upon CSS and much more maintainable.
I feel that this is a good time to do it, whilst the site is growing in popularity but before it's sufficiently well known that a new look would alienate too many people.
Many areas of the site have been tweaked, improved, or recoded.
Hopefully everything works as well as it did before, if not better! But if there are any problems or you wish to leave feedback feel free to comment.
This article can be found online at the Debian Administration website at the following bookmarkable URL:
This article is copyright 2004 Steve - please ask for permission to republish or translate.