Website Released

The team and I have been working hard to get an Eco Forum website ready over the past few weeks.

I am pleased to announce the site is ready for release although there will be quite a lot more content added over the coming weeks and perhaps the odd feature. Please take a look around.

For anyone interested in the technology behind the site, I’ll include a little extra information.

cumbria.ecoforum.org.uk is a static Jekyll site hosted on GitHub Pages. I have created quite a few sites with these technologies in the past, including my own site, craigchamberlain.it. It’s a great system with enough features including https enforcement and custom domains.

As I’m working with for this site, I decided to implement a content management system (CMS), which I had not done with Jekyll before. I quickly found Forestry as a compatible CMS and found it easy to customise. With a few adaptions, I was able to hide the code from the others on the team and give them the means to add and edit content themselves.

Another new element for me with this site is custom redirects. Github Pages handles redirects from www.domain.com to domain.com as standard. However, with cumbria.ecoforum.org I wanted to redirect from ecoforum.org. This could be achieved with an entry in an .htaccess file or some other routing system. However, we are running this domain without a webserver of our own.

I resorted to making a redirect page for each page of cumbria.ecoforum.org and upload to a parallel ecoforum.org site. Rather than doing this longhand, I used PowerShell to create the files and directories required.

We have some other interesting features from GSuite but I’ll save them for another article.

I hope you enjoy the site. If you have any questions about the site please get in touch, craig@craig.chamberlain.it.