We've a new website at Codigo23
As I've told you some weeks ago in my summary of the first three months of 2011 I've been quite busy since the beginning of the year. Things hadn't change too much the past three months and that's the reason for this low-posting period (again).
One of the projects I spent most of my time working on was the new Codigo23 website. For the past few years we had a coming soon page, buf finally we found the time to finish the new site contents. Once the contents were ready, we packed them in a not-so-complex website powered by Python, django and some Mako templates. The design was made by Sond3 , a design and web development company from Lugo.
The new site contains information about the different kind of services provided by the company, from software development to servers and networks management, security services or python-related training.
We are working in an open source section, that will contain source code, snippets and many more things, including full source code access to projects released by the company. A papers section is almost ready too, there we are going to publish manuals, articles and how-to documents to share our knowledge base with the community.
We are open! (TM)
Right now it is available only in spanish, but we are working on the english and galician versions (I hope they will be available soon).
One of the best parts of working on this site was to explore new ideas and concepts about website development. In this case, instead of using a pre-built CMS or writing our own CMS, we just wrote some html code using Mako templates and a simple python script that parses the templates, generating the needed static html files containing all the contents of the website.
Then we wrote a small django application that has two functions:
- It manages a small blog-like tool, which allow us to have a dynamic blog section, including rss feeds, tagging, comments, etc
- It serves a very simple REST API, that is used by some JQuery code in the static javascript files to interact with both the blog and the handlers for the website forms.
I think you will see it clearer in this schema:
Obviously this approach has its benefits (static html files served by a well-configured web server is much faster than using dynamic CMS-like applications) and its drawbacks (non-tech users would find editing the mako templates difficult, but hey, we are developers!).
The Codigo23 website has been one of the projects but there was more work to do. We've got some new projects, some of them really really promising ones, and Zavo required some time too.
Good thing is that I've some good expectations for the next months, which is really good news nowadays.