Wickett.org through time
The original site(s) using – gasp!!! – FrontPage navigation and static pages.
Wickett.org 1.0: the early years
Wickett.org came to life in 1997. Changes in ISP’s resulted in our e-mail addresses changing 6 times in 7 months. It was time for stability. And since we had a domain name, we might as well put up a website.
The first incarnation was static HTML living on a FrontPage enabled server. Groovy! So groovy, in fact, that it still lives.
Wickett.org 2.0: the pMachine years
The first “fancy” wickett.org ran on pMachine. Now available as an open source platform, pMachine is incredibly fast and has some nice features. I really should apply some of my current understanding of css and html layouts to a pMachine site. I cut my teeth on building the holy grail – the table-less css layout building pMachine sites.
Wickett.org 3.0: the Mambo period
Some sites I was maintaining needed some features that pMachine didn’t provide. Mambo seemed like a great choice. And it might have been. But development of Mambo fractured. Bugs and security holes popped out of every corner. Mambo had to go.
Wickett 4.0 – Layout originally applied with bitweaver. I liked it so much, it hung around for Wickett 5.0 on Drupal.
Wickett.org 4.0: bitweaver digs in
Mambo still lived on for some sites I maintained, but it grew more and more unruly and prone to hacks. Some sites I managed to talk into using alternatives. The Miata site became forum only.
A friend suggested I play with bitweaver. It was a tad slow, but it had all the features I needed, and I learned a lot about page design building the Wickett 4.0 layout. In fact, I liked the layout so much, I kept it! The 4.0 site is also still living at least until the next time a mandatory (read: security related) upgrade for bitweaver comes out.
Wickett.org 5.0: Drupal rhymes with “Roople”
I’ve been recommending Drupal for new sites and have built quite a few over the past few years. I’ve been meaning to convert Wickett for quite a while, but the cobbler’s kids usually do go barefoot. Drupal properly configured runs rather faster than bitweaver, and it has some modules that do a better job at presenting some info than the stock bitweaver modules.
One of my frustrations has been finding a base site template to build from – as is frequently a concern when using content management systems. Zen themes were a godsend. Suddenly, I had a true and proper blank slate to start from, and within an hour, I had the foundation of the design you see here now up and running.
