Web history


This is yet another phase in the life of this website - the FOURTH incarnation so far!

Original site

The beginnings

The Kent School Association (KSA) website was created as part of the organisation for the first KSA Kenties reunion in 2002 - and it even appeared in the original web address www.kentschool2002.co.uk.

Daz Bryant The first webmaster was Daryl Bryant (that's him on the left) who not only successfully launched the website but also expertly took the role as host for the evening at the first Butlins event in Minehead. It was a fantastic event and established the KSA as a focal point for all ex-Kent School pupils - and many staff too.

The website also became more established, with an early version of the guestbook and chatroom area. The web address also lost its "2002" extension and eyes started to move to the reunion plans for the following year.


Moving on

Colin D Miller After the first reunion the baton was passed on to Colin Miller (the current webmaster) to carry on Daz's work. Colin set about redesigning the site and also transferring it to our current ISP. He also added another Chat room facility that was recommended to him - which offered extra facilities (like sound ... we do like that whip!).

The website then received several face lifts (including the ones shown below) as it grew and developed. Slowly the website evolved with a new guest book and message board facility written by us that we were able to fully integrated within the website. It also hosted the planning - and eventual reporting - of the following reunion in Skegness in 2003.

The first relaunch site

Eventually the galleries of pictures grew as Kenties met up around the country and sent pictures in. Also the guest book started to see rogue entries as "spam guests" - the guest book equivalent of spam mail - started to appear on the site too. To address this the guest book code was updated to filter out any odd looking "guests" - up to 50 a day!

The first makeover of the site by Colin

It became clear that the site was growing more complex and difficult to manage and so Colin set about extending the code used to run the guest book and message board to support the whole website.











Along came NEWT ...

NEWT site

So in 2007 we produced a much revised website - almost all run using PERL code written especially for the KSA by Colin (NEWT, or Nice and Easy Web Technology!). It offered us the ability to update it very quickly from wherever we are and support more advanced webbie kinds of stuff.





After a while of being purple, it got re-coloured to a nice red scheme...

Recoloured NEWT site























And now the big bad WOLF

The new WOLF CMS site

But time does not stand still and over the period of 2011 to 2013 Colin set about the task to rebuild the entire site using a proper content management system - WOLF. This CMS (content management system) is written in PHP so all the NEWT Kentie-specific functionality (Guest book, Message Board etc;) had to be rewritten too!

We hope you like the result!

In the end the website is for you guys out there - we hope that it serves you all well!

Smiley



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Page last updated on: Fri, 13 Sep 2013 09:18