Brand new you're retro

So why a backend redesign? well, originally the site was just meant for us... basically we needed to list the animals we had available, and the easiest way to do that was just do it manually through a mysql frontend (rather than building an ugly php backend). When the site started getting some decent amounts of traffic, a few organisations asked if we could list animals for them, and we realised we could help a lot of the other welfare organisations around by also listing their available animals.

The problem then became the lack of time to properly maintain the site as well as feeding and cleaning the animals, and working our regular day jobs (so we can pay for the feeding of the animals). After looking around at the major Content Management Systems to rebuild the site on top, we discovered zope and plone, and found it to be the best of the lot by a long long way (mambo was our second choice).

So then we had the idea of a portal type site that would essentially give shelters a free site to list their animals, post news, articles and events, etc. we registered www.animalshelter.com.au and will soon start on getting it all up and running. The idea is each Shelter has their own site/domain that will only display their animals, news, etc. Then the main 'portal' will have all the animals from all the shelters listed, giving them more exposure.

So here it is, the site has been redesigned to fit plone/zope, i think most of it is working, but chances are i've missed something somewhere, so if you come up to a broken page, don't be alarmed, it'll hopefully get fixed soon! A lot of the css has been tweaked from the last version of the site, so the code should be a lot cleaner. There are still issues with older browsers, but as they are such a small minority, it's really not worth the hassle of trying to fix ie5.2mac related issues. The price we pay to be cutting edge!