We built Corbières Web almost exactly ten years ago, when we first moved to France. The primary aim was to have a site we could put in the portfolio of our budding web development company. We had a wonderful time travelling around the area taking hundreds of photos and discovering all sorts of out-of-the-way places. And we landed our first large contract as a direct result of someone seeing Corbières Web. As the first website dedicated to the area, it built up a fair amount of traffic and even won an award from the Comité Régional de Tourisme. So it certainly wasn’t a waste of time.

Then we got busy and the site got pushed so far away from the stove it wasn’t even anywhere near the back burner. I added links to it occasionally, when people emailed me and asked, and we added a few pages to it for local businesses, for a small charge. But the last time the design was touched was in 1999, and it was beginning to look a bit embarrassing. It wasn’t just the surface appearance that was old-fashioned; the code was a mess of font tags, nested tables, and invalid HTML. And this mass of 150 or so static pages was time-consuming to update, so it just didn’t get done.

I started converting it to use a CMS about a year ago in order to make updates easier, but once again didn’t have the time to complete the job. But then thanks to an online CSS workshop class he was taking, Steve picked it up as a challenge for his final project. The old design was completely scrapped and he came up with a classy new design that is valid XHTML Strict. We merged this with my work on the CMS and were able to launch the converted site within a week.

One of the challenges of the site was that it is bilingual English-French, and each page linked to its equivalent in the other language. Using SPIP for the content management means that you can easily link different language versions of the same content so that links to translations appear automatically, and when visitors choose which language they want to view the site in, that choice is automatically retained. This is the third SPIP site we’ve done, and the more I use SPIP the more impressed I am with it. Its syntax for “squelettes” (templates) and “boucles” (loops) takes a bit of getting used to, but it’s very powerful and I haven’t yet found anything I couldn’t do — even if some things require a fair amount of fiddling to get right. The documentation is superb, some of the best I’ve seen for an open-source web application, and spip-contrib is a good source of extra tips.