Welcome to my new and improved site! What, you don't see anything different? Great, because you shouldn't, not at first glance, anyway.
Fact of the matter is, I've made an effort to make my new site look as much like the old one as possible, because there was nothing at all wrong with the way it looked.
So, what has changed? Well, the previous version of the site was a combination of custom PHP code (structure based on that of the site for the Mini Seven Club) and bblog, an open source blogging package written in PHP. Now, the entire site is based on Joomla!, an open source content management system (CMS). This makes administration easier for me, and it allows me to play around with Joomla!, which is just very cool if you're a web geek.
The biggest change that you can see from the outside, probably, is that the site is now multi-lingual; in the top-right corner you will see two small flag icons. They represent the two languages that my site will now be available in, Dutch and English. I will not have translated everything right away (the system I use just allows you to easily switch between different versions of your content, it doesn't do the translation for you), and I probably won't translate everything. If you don't see an article in the language you selected, it means it's not available and you'll have to make do with the one you're looking at (or that I didn't get to translating it yet - if you find something in Dutch that you would really like to read in English, drop me an email through the contact section and I'll see what I can do).
To give you something to read in Dutch, I've translated all news items about my white Cooper. Don't forget to click the flag icon at the top right to switch to Dutch. Incidentally, it's no longer possible to assign different categories to a single news item (possibly the one disadvantage of switching to Joomla), so you might come accross stuff that keaves you wondering what it has to do with the rest of the story. In the future, I'll try to not discuss multiple subjects in a single article.
In addition to the new Dutch version, I also added a few sections in addition to those that were available already. These are the changes to the basic site structure:
- I created a new page about my BMW Mini Cooper Checkmate in the style of the other car pages.
- I moved all cars into a single section, so no more separate Mini and MG sections.
- I created a section about my other big hobby, web development and design.
- The picture section is back, better than ever. It is now powered by Flickr, which I already wrote about before.
A smaller change is that now, instead of complete articles, you'll just find the first bit of the article on the frontpage, and you can decide whether you want to read more by clicking the link that follows the teaser, or you can scroll further down to see if anything else grabs your interest.
Lastly, comments are back like you have never seen them before (well, not on this site, anyway). You can now comment on almost any page on the site and you can use BBCodes and smilies (if you ever come to the forum of the MSCN, they should look familiar).