arcoiris.org.ec Launched

Finally, finally, after waay too much time and delays, version 1.0 of the Arcoiris website is up and running. It took me awhile to get all the information that I needed out of the Arcoiris staff, but I eventually got an amazingly well done set of noticias which I promptly translated and used my own update system to post. And the rest of the stuff I needed I just improvised.

I'm still in sort of crunch time after launch, fixing and tweaking things, but I'm really happy with the way the site is looking at the moment. Especially considering how the old site was. But it has been A LOT of work over these past few months. It's probably the single biggest project I've ever brought to completion in my coding history. I'm proud.

I'm currently also making some pretty big updates at the same time however, right off the bat. First of all, I'm changing the whole site to identical php files. Only their filenames will differ. This also involves centralizing the entirety of the html into only two or so files, which should make any updates that I want to make to the actual layout and appearance of the site very easy and universal.

Also, in the process, I'm changing the navbar, because it's kind of sketchy right now, and I honestly can't tell you how or why it works. It works, right? I've been experimenting with Flash using OpenLaszlo, but after consideration, I think I'm just going to go with a simple list navbar. I want people without Flash player to be able to use the navbar, and I don't want to scare people away with over animation either.

I'm also setting up some feeds for the news systems. Atom and rss, for the English and Spanish versions. That should be cool, and some good experience for me. I just really hope the Arcoiris people use this news system after I wrote it all. I am absolutely content with what I learned in writing it, but still I just hope they realize how awesome it is. Ángel asked me one day to allow him to update the site without knowing anything about code, but I don't know if he realizes how huge of an untertaking it was in achieving that.

But, it's achieved. Update any page on the site, or add/delete/edit news items, all in English and Spanish, all without touching any code, html, or ftp. It's pretty sweet.

Hopefully the rest of my plans go as well.