This really happened because the website was difficult to maintain and, more importantly, the maintenance could not easily be delegated to a group of willing volunteers. For any one person to maintain it really requires heroic effort, or at least a lot of free time and I just didn't have this time.
We also quickly got to the limit of the content management solution we were using to manage the site and to go forward required purchasing the software - something I was unwilling to recommend as the software had shown itself to be a poor match.
Fast forward two years and there were an abundance of very sophisticated open source website solutions available. Open source means that (a) the software is freely available - i.e. has no cost and (b) you can easily modify the software because you have all the source code. Additionally, open source products tend to be very well supported by a global community of altruistic people.
I looked at the recommendations made by other people and evaluated a number of different packages and I came to the conclusion that "e107" best met our needs and was a compromise between functionality, customisability and the ability to devolve administration to a group of computer literate volunteers, i.e. YOU LOT!
And then it went wrong!
On the whole the software worked well: it was easy to customise and had a lot of features. The problem we discovered was that the WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor embedded within it was flakey. Ths editor was used when writing news articles and is very similar tousing Microsoft Word. But it just wouldn't work - you'd type something in and it would look fine. Then you'd save the news item and it would look completely different with all the formatting lost or muddled up and carefully spaced lines all joined into one big ugly paragraph.
Poor old Peter frequently tore his hair out. I asked him to have patience confident that the open source community behind the e107 software would be on the case. Sadly they weren't. I think it was just too ard for them to solve. The forums on the e107 website would frequently have the same question asked "when is the WYSIWYG editor going to be fixed?" but there would never be any responses except from other knowing users who had asked the question previously themselves.
More new software
A year later and yet again another new batch of content management systems have appeared. Seeing that the problems with e107 were not going to be resolved, and after a fair amount of nagging from Peter, I gave in and started looking again. I came across this system, dotnetnuke. There are nearly half a million registered users on the dotnetnuke website. This is a well used system. I ran a basic evaluation, looking particularly at the features we were using on the existing website and also to see if the troublesome formatting problems existed (which they don't). It has extra features, such as a photo gallery, which should provide real interest for visitors.
Ideally I would like to evaluate all the systems on offer but there are literally hundreds of them and it would take months if not years to evaluate them properly.
Like the previous website introduced last year this is very much work in progress. If the last one was version 1 then this is version 2. We've got nearly 70 users on the previous site so the beginnings of community are there. Now with this new system and a renewed vigour we can continue to move incrementally to create a powerful village resource.
Somehow in the last three years the village has become a lot more web-wise. It seems almost everyone has access to the internet and most have broadband. People are now managing their finances and ordering their shopping online. The internet is almost as much a commodity as running water and a telephone. I think that the time is right for a village website that will deliver value to the community.
The ethos of this website is about community, contribution and collaboration.
A call for volunteers
For this to work we are going to need a small group of computer literate volunteers to edit and publish news, keep the list of events up to date and to moderate the forums.
Ideas for the future
Where do I see this site going? Well. At the moment it primarily provides news, an events diary, forums, blogs and photo galleries. We can store documents (such as the parish magazine). It requires registration to be able to post messages on the forum. When people have registered we will then have the ability to email everyone if there are community notices, such as if we require help with community projects or if there are other urgent messages that should be sent.
We can host private forums and private areas. So if there is a village organisation that wants a way to collaborate online then we can provide that very quickly.