Signposts - a blog about Te Ara the Encyclopedia of New Zealand

Recently Te Ara made the biggest change since it launched. However, on the surface little has changed. This is part of a series of posts that will try to explain why it’s exciting for us and why we hope it’s exciting for you. We’ve broken the story into three parts: Te Ara past, present and future.

Te Ara present

In part one I talked about why Te Ara moved to the Drupal content management system (CMS). While we were messing around ‘out back’, we took the time to make some changes to the front. Ross listed them in his post but let’s take a closer look at what has changed.

Browse Te Ara
In the past the navigation around the Te Ara relied on people understanding the site’s structure:

Home » theme » sub-theme » story

Later we added this column browser to allow users to browse through our stories.

However, because of the technical limitations mentioned in part one, we could only easily add it to the home page. The old CMS also meant the listings had to be added by hand, rather than dynamically. Moving to Drupal enabled us to link the browser to the CMS and add it to every page on the site.

At the top of each story page is a button to ‘Browse Te Ara’ which, once clicked, will reveal the browser. This is now our primary navigation, and we can’t wait to see how people use it, the categories they browse, and their feedback.

Search
To see how we’ve improved our search, compare these two sets of results for ‘kiwi’:

You wouldn’t expect the story titled Australians being listed before the story devoted to kiwi would you? (And, when comparing the image and media search results, I noticed the old search listed the cheddarmaster before the brown kiwi!?) The results on the right are far more relevant, and they’re generated by Sphinx, Te Ara’s new search engine. This has been a long overdue improvement, and the much better search results continue to amaze those of us that use it everyday.

The Short Story
Every story in Te Ara also comes in a simpler, refined, easy read that we call the Short Story. The Short Story has changed in two ways. First, the button is now in the same position no matter what page you’re on.

Second, the old button opened the Short Story in a pop-up, which had its drawbacks. So we now use a technique called Lightbox to display the short story. This blog also uses Lightbox to display larger images. In fact, here’s an example of both.

New location of biographies

Biographies
Previously, story pages had a tab that listed relevant biographies from the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography (DNZB). We’ve now moved the links to relevant biographies to the bottom of the story page, above the footer. Currently, we display a thumbnail picture, name and what the DNZB people call ‘years of activity’ (usually their birth and death dates), but we’re hoping to add more information later … more about that in part three.

Tabs (above) vs Back to Story (below)

Tabs
The biggest change to the in-story navigation was the removal of the tabs. They seemed like a good idea, but whenever we watched people use the site, hardly anyone used the tabs and most didn’t even know they were there. Once we moved the biographies inside the story, the only purpose to the tabs was to switch between the images and the story. We decided a ‘Back to Story’ button, similar to Trade Me’s ‘Back to listing’ button, would be clearer, and more useful. Also, by freeing up the space, we could keep the short story button location consistent. However, out of all the changes, removing the tabs seems to be the most contentious amongst our users. What do you think? Do you prefer the tabs or the back to story button?

Other bits and bobs
Those are the biggest changes, but you may notice little tweaks like new icons and our new media series layout. Hopefully you haven’t seen our new 404 page, which unfortunately became quite popular while we were working the kinks out of our URL redirection thingamabob.

As I mentioned in the first part of this series, what matters is that a huge barrier has now disappeared and Te Ara can start evolving. But, other than the modifications we’ve already made during the migration, what is going to change? Where is Te Ara heading? I’ll let you know, what I can, in part three.

Subscribe to Signposts to make sure you don’t miss Part three – Te Ara future, a look at what’s next.

Recently Te Ara made the biggest change since it launched. However, on the surface little has changed. This is part of a series of posts that will try to explain why it’s exciting for us and why we hope it’s exciting for you. We’ve broken the story into three parts: Te Ara past, present and future.

Te Ara past

Te Ara – The Encyclopedia of New Zealand landed on the internet in February 2005. It contained 106 stories and 3,000 images. Over the past four years we’ve added over 300 stories and over 9,000 images, but few new web features. Why did we focus on richer content and not on the surrounding website?

I came to work at Te Ara a year after the launch, and heard the stories of late nights attempting to get the content ready for launch. But the Te Ara I got to know was the new Te Ara, a well-oiled, encyclopedic machine. Everything at this point was about Earth, Sea and Sky, a theme that included 117 more stories. The team worked feverishly on writing, checking, editing, researching images, clearing copyright, optimising images and designing maps, graphs and diagrams for the somewhat bare encyclopedia. Away from the busy production line, the team excitedly discussed new features and changes that they’d like on the site. However, few ideas could slip past the barrier that quickly blocked that exciting future.

The existing content management system (CMS) made changes to the site expensive, overly complicated, time-consuming and dependant on external developers. Compromises were made when adding new features so they were independent of the CMS. Important changes like improving our search engine became too hard. However, this blog, our Flickr group, @Te_Ara on Twitter, and the ability for users to submit their own stories were created almost overnight because they were managed outside the CMS.

So, when it was time to upgrade to the latest version of the existing CMS (at great expense), we leapt at the opportunity and began searching for a new one. I won’t bore you with process; it involves scoping, proofs of concepts, RFPs and lots of other phrases and acronyms. The short story is, we found Drupal. It’s nice, friendly, and free (i.e. open-source). Unfortunately our old CMS had one last trick up its sleeve: it was going to hold onto all the content as tight as possible and we didn’t have the key. (Sorry editors, if you let me write a blog post, I’m going to mix me some metaphors.)

A long, complicated project to migrate Te Ara’s 2 million elements came to an end several months ago. It was more complicated than anyone expected, and involved long stints of testing and the creation of a new authoring system. Also ,we took the opportunity to make a few changes … more about that in part two.

On 25 August 2009, the new Drupal-driven site started delivering web pages to you, the user. Then it stopped for a few hours. Then we got it going again. But that’s not important. What matters is that a huge barrier has now disappeared and Te Ara can start evolving.

Subscribe to Signposts to make sure you don’t miss Part two – Te Ara present, a look at the new features.