This week was a big step for the new.shropshire.gov.uk project. 'Phase 2' has been pushed out so quickly and efficiently that if you blinked, you would have missed it!
'Phase 1' of new.shropshire.gov.uk, released as a protoptype earlier this year, started out life using Umbraco 5. Initially it looked very promising, but we were new to the Umbraco scene and once the prototype was released as a beta site we were starting to see a number of issues.
The main problem was the slowness of the site. It wasn't just slow, it was very slow... very-very slow... very-very-very... well, you get the point.
A news item in June this year brought us some interesting news though. Umbraco 5 was (somewhat unsurprisingly) being killed off, which we feel was a brave and probably the correct decision. That meant the months of work we put into developing 5 would be lost. However, we did not give up on Umbraco and instead we decided to rebuild new.shropshire.gov.uk using Umbraco 4 - the previous release. This version was tried and trusted, widely used and - more importantly - it was fast!
So in the last few months we've been porting our changes. Migrating our slow prototype site to a much quicker and usable production site (using Umbraco 4.9), and today we are pleased to announce that that switch over is now complete (good-bye slow coach v5) and we have also now dropped out of beta!
As well as migrating, we have also taken the time to revisit some of the code that we 'threw together' in the prototype site, making some behind-the-scenes improvements and polishing up the look & feel of the pages themselves. So, barring some inevitable bugs that may exist after launch, we hope that users will also experience an improved interaction with the site.
What is next
The first service selected for the prototype (Libraries) has now been migrated over, and we've thrown the switch to make this new version accessible on the production site. We are just around the corner from releasing our next service area - Recycling and rubbish, and are already laying the foundations for our 3rd service area - Planning.
Feedback
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