NCSE’s New Website

The National Center for Science Education has long planned a revision of their web pages. Now, the new version of their website is officially up and running. Check it out.

The previous version is still available, though. There will be a period of confusion until Google spiders both sites, as the old content has been incorporated into the new framework, which presents different URLs for access. The legacy site was coded and contributed by Ira Walter back in 1998. It served NCSE well for several years, but Walter’s time commitments prevented him from doing much in the way of updates. The combination of custom coding and targeting of a specific host setup caused NCSE, and me, a bit of a headache in 2006 just before Thanksgiving when Ira Walter died and shortly thereafter the server hosting the site died. It dropped into my lap to get the site running again on a new server at the same hosting company, whose different underlying software architecture required some basic changes in the way various functions worked. NCSE had been hobbling along with the patched website.

Now, it looks like they have a good basis for carrying their content into the future. The Drupal content management system is a widely-used, actively developed, open source system that is themable and flexible. If a change in presentation is needed, it only requires theme changes.