As a student council, we have had a webseite externer Link since 2013. Our website was based on Plone and had no visual changes in these 10 years. (Compare 2015 externer Link and 2023 externer Link) This era came to an end in November 2023. We have completely redesigned our website and reworked the content. In this article I will go into some details of the new website and how it came about.

Result⌗

The new website can be reached at https://fachschaft.tf/ externer Link. The old site can be found temporarily at https://old.fachschaft.tf/ externer Link or permanently at the Internet Archive externer Link for comparison.

A screenshot of the startpage
A screenshot of the startpage

I am very pleased with the new website. Much of the content has been reworked and the site has been visually refreshed refresh. We have also added many useful features

  • multi-language support (although not all articles are translated yet)
  • functional search
  • light and dark mode

The site is based on Hugo externer Link a static site generator. The content is written in Markdown. We use a customised version of the Hugoplate theme externer Link. We use tailwindcss externer Link for styling. All libraries used can be found on the license page externer Link.

Why a new website was needed⌗

The website was originally set up in 2013 and has been maintained since then. Unfortunately, maintenance has been neglected over the last few years. It was running on a version of Plone that was 4 years old.

During these 10 years the site has naturally accumulated some technical debt. The site used a number of custom Plone extensions. The extensions were poorly documented, if at all, and the original authors had long since left. Some of the changes that had to be done on a semi-regular basis were also unnecessarily hidden in the admin interface.

The final straw was that we could no longer rebuild the site if something broke. The age of the Plone version had the unfortunate effect that the repositories associated with that version had been taken offline. A disaster wasn’t even necessary to cause problems. All it would take to cause significant problems would be old boot drives that have to be replaced. Much of my effort with the student council servers was directed at replacing legacy systems and implementing stable systems that would work for many years into the future. So having this huge pile of technical debt at the heart of our public face was a big worry for me.

History⌗

We are not the first ones to recognise the need for a new website, but we are the first ones to see it through. Here is a brief history of the attempts to create a new website.

The first efforts to rebuild the website began in April of 2020. The vision of these efforts was surprisingly similar to the result we have now. (Internal people can read the design document externer Link in the pad.) These early efforts already envisaged a statically rendered site with the content written as markdown. This effort died off about 5 months later in August of 2020.

A third attempt was started in April of 2022. The basic idea was still the same: generate a static site with markdown content. This time Jekyll was chosen as the SSG, as opposed to the more primitive rendering with pandoc in the first attempt. The third attempt was again short-lived. Unlike earlier attempts, this time a first prototype was achieved.

The fourth and finally successful attempt was started on 19 September 2023. At the end of November 2023, we presented the website to the student council. The website went live in early December 2023.