Phoenix site updates

On the forum Mike briefly made mention of a new system for updating the site. Funnily enough I've just finished off a job in conjunction with that today.

During the first season we didn't really have any systems in place for managing the site. It was pretty much stick everything into HTML files and upload. Now that's great when you've got people who understand HTML and everything else, like me & Mike, but ain't so great in allowing other people to get stuff on the site.

The result was that at times me and Mike become a bottleneck and the office were occasionally waiting for us to read our emails before stuff could go up - this was made worse by us both having regular day jobs that have to take priority.

Now at work in my regular job, I work for ManchesterOnline. You may have noticed their name at the bottom of the Official Site, in part that means that we can use MancheseterOnline systems on the Phoenix site. So during the last-season I've been doing some work so that content for the Phoenix site is managed using the same system we use for ManchesterOnline.

The final upshot of this is that once the club gets going properly again, the office will now be able to upload their own stories. In fact we've had the system in place since new year, so the first thing we did was allow Richard to use it as he'd been working on the new features stuff.

What still had to be done was get all the old stuff we'd put into those HTML files into the system so that everything is in one place. The downer is the job consists of simply copying stuff from one place and pasting it into another.

Well today - 223 articles later, I've finished that job!

Although much of it has been a drag in some ways it was nice to go through some of the old stuff - good times and bad times.

If you fancy a browse yourself, we've used the new system to re-generate the archives. You'll find links at the bottom of the news and features pages.

The second thing that's been added is some RSS feeds. If you've got some relevant news reader software then point it at http://rss.manchesterphoenix.co.uk/home.xml or alternately replace home.xml with news.xml or features.xml for the relevant pages.