Welcome to the New GNE

Three years ago we launched an ambitious site with a lot of potential. We had it aggregating news from all of our other sites, and it was to become the central hub for all things GNE. However, since it was designed to be low maintenance, it turned into zero maintenance, and has been broken and unusable for the last year or two. We've moved on, and our website was becoming increasingly more of an embarrassment. More importantly, it was completely useless. Something had to change.

Last year we launched GNE Solutions, and wrote a nice django powered website to go with it. There's still a lot of work to put into it, but it's easily maintainable, and much simpler to add small improvements to. We wanted to do the same thing for GNE, but time hadn't allowed us to copy GNE Solutions and then hack it into something that could work for GNE.

Then, one of use RTFM'd.

Django, the wonderful web framework it is, has the concept of 'Sites'. Basically, you can share things between two different domains, both pointed at the same database. Which means your sites can share content. Also, it means we could drop a settings file into the GNE Solutions site, tweak some CSS and suddenly we have a working site for GNE, using the same backend and content as GNE Solutions. This was much simpler, and much less development time.

The new face of GNE was done in a few hours after that.

Future Plans

I'm sure a quick look at the site, and you'll see places we're obviously not done yet. We're debating adding a developer blog section, and the blog infrastructure needs some work. Then there's the sparse content that needs some filling in. We also would like a comment framework, and eventually, to integrate this into a custom written forum. But, for now, we're much happier with this.

Please, enjoy the new site. And if you'd like to give us feedback, feel free to send it to webmaster@g33xnexus.com.