So why take all this time and energy to convert a perfectly good, working website? That is actually a good question.

The current site is running a slightly customized version of RavenNuke. I was even a member of the development team. I worked alongside some pretty talented people to fix the numerous bugs and security holes in the base PHP-Nuke code. RavenNuke is an order of magnitude greater than the stock PHP-Nuke from a stability, security, and speed standpoint. So why chuck that out the window?

The answer, simply put, is I want to learn something new. Some things in life you use as-is because they fit your purposes. Other things you have to modify to get them to do what you want, not always by choice. And other things you modify because you enjoy doing it and want to learn something. The latter is the case with me. By no means is my jumping ship to Django a slight at the fine people at RavenNuke. Working with that team was a very positive experience for me.

The current incarnation of SG101 does basically what I want it to do, but some things about it bug me. So I could go off and change these annoying things. However, changing the existing code is a nightmare, despite the great work the RavenNuke team did. The existing code is built on an aging code-base that had little in the way of peer review or community input, is very low level, and provides little infrastructure. I’m being very polite here. When writing an app for Nuke, you end up doing most things by hand including writing SQL queries and tediously validating form inputs. The presentation is all jumbled up with the application logic. After a while it isn’t fun anymore, and it takes a lot of time to change the smallest thing.

The potential I see with Django is great. There is plenty of well-thought-out infrastructure to take the drudgery out of the work, not to mention lessening chances of introducing errors and bugs. You don’t have to write SQL if you don’t want to, you get forms that validate themselves, and there is a nice separation of database models, business logic, and presentation. The auto-generated admin interface is a huge benefit! That takes care of half the work of writing an application for the site. The fun is back!

Now I get a chance to learn about a new framework and new language (Python), and recode my site to my exact specifications. A geek’s dream. There are many challenges ahead, and this is not going to be an easy task.

Okay, with a couple of these introductory posts out of the way, I hope to start getting into some design and details. I’ll create a special blog category for the SG101 2.0 related posts to capture the process of reworking the site. Stay tuned!

P.S. Oh and I did find out how to tweak the WordPress theme a bit. I changed some CSS styles. I’m still not thrilled with it but it will be good enough for now.