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--- hosting:newwebsiteplan [2018/08/31 11:43] – jim
+++ hosting:newwebsiteplan [2023/03/13 15:14] (current) – jim
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 ====== Thoughts on a plan for a new website ======
+(This page is the original notes for what turned eventually into the current main website. It is now of historic interested only. I will note that a COTS membership system turned out to be rather more of a challenge than anticipated, and at the time of writing - March 2023 - an unsolved problem.)
 First, let's quickly summarise some problems with the current website.
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 URLs on the existing site are generally of the form ''/index.php/area/page''. Obviously it would be desirable in the main to preserve URLs for those who have stored them. Hugo generates URLs following
 the file structure under its source ''content'' directory, so a structure with ''/area/page'' would be logical and possible. An Apache rewrite rule to redirect URLs starting ''/index.php'' to the plain page URL would be fairly straightforward.
+===== However =====
+Since writing the above, I have looked closer at some of the URL structures. There's a lot - all journal articles, for example - which are of the form ''/index.php/journal/12345''. The latter number is simply the number of the article in the Xaraya database table. A similar form applies to book reviews.
+I don't think these are sustainable. I propose instead to move to a more rational arrangement, ''/journals/CVu/<issue number>/<authorname>''. Existing content will be extracted from the database by a small bit of Python, which will also generate a ''journals/12345'' stub containing an HTML redirection to the new path. Going forward, manual addition of new articles is obvious.
+For journals this will require modifications to the index generation process. But since the index is generated by a program at the moment, I think this is doable.
+There's a related concern with book reviews. A bit more thought is required on the URL form, but again the idea of generating a redirection file for existing reviews should work.