First, let's quickly summarise some problems with the current website.

• It looks more than a bit dated.
• It's wholly dynamic, which makes hosting more difficult. Any sort of HTTP caching is disabled. In any non-trivial traffic situation, the hosting struggles a lot.
• The underlying CMS, Xaraya, has been unmaintained for over a decade.
• The version of Xaraya used, 1.2.3, is based on PHP 5.6. This, the last of the 5 series, will go out of security maintenance at the end of 2018. We have determined that some changes will be definitely required for PHP 7. How many is unknowable, but the changes we do know about start with needing to change the MySQL interface.
• The content is nearly all held in the MySQL database. Which in turn means it's not easy to know what content is present.

None of the above should be interpreted as a criticism of the original decisions. It's more how things have panned out over time. And the current system does have some important features.

• The membership system. ALl handling of membership, including subscription reminders, payments etc. is done via a custom Xaraya module.
• There is a custom module for book reviews.
• Requiring a website login means that online access to the journals can be restricted.

The above problems has been clear for some time, but it has proved difficult to move forward. The problem, it seems to me, is that the problem has been considered in terms of a replacement of the current site, and a replacement is a non-trivial job. It's difficult to see how it can be approached incrementally.

This is amplified by the all-volunteer nature of ACCU. Without engaging in a serious procurement exercise, we need to be able to utilise members' skills, and these do not, typically, include website design and an thirst for working on old PHP systems.