PageBuild: Our Original CMS

Note: The purpose of this page is only to discuss PageBuild, our original Content Management System (CMS) for those who are interested. There's nothing about 80s movies here.

If you haven't already, start with the introduction...

Most of the following is only included for historical posterity, so it's probably not very interesting!

In the beginning of 2001, after 7 months solid work, the PageBuild software was finally used for the first time for real to make a real page for the site (in the original design) about "The Last Dragon".

Many weeks of testing, improvement and rewrites later, it was rolled out to a select bunch of our page authors for real user testing. At this point the flow of new pages on to the site picked up again.

In late February 2001, PageBuild had become a stable and effective CMS for the old design of pages and at this point development work started to concentrate on the new design.

Because by this time PageBuild was a "live" application used by real users on the web, the application was split into two versions. A live version and a development version. The development version was adapted in a couple of days [24th/25th Feb 2001] to build the new pages whilst the live version stayed operational until the very last day of the original site's operation.

A couple of bugs that had not shown themselves under the old design were squashed and had to be fixed on both versions at the same time.

After that, it was "simply" a matter of putting the old pages into PageBuild's database and asking it to build a new site ...As well as adding loads of pictures and new info.

This was started in the week starting February 26th 2001. On Saturday 10th March the last pages were added and we prepared for the changeover the next day at 01:00 hrs PST.

The pages took so long to enter because when we were doing it we realised that we needed better info, more pictures and more trivia --all of which had to be researched. Also about 200 more bugs revealed themselves during the process and subsequent testing! [as is usual ]

The first, live version was v.1.17a

The Story Continues...

Having been steadily developed during it's first six months of near-flawless operation, PageBuild had quietly moved onward to v1.27c. This evolution had probably involved less than 50 new "Baby steps" versions. Also introduced during this time were a brand new innovative & sophisticated "Contact Module", the "PFR1101" product search device and a brand new, improved user submissions module, as well as a Competitions Management Module.

On 9th August 2001, anyone watching the version numbers on the pages would have seen that it suddenly jumped through a major version change, taking it to version 2.x.

This signalled the the end of a major top to bottom re-write of it's core modules; The purpose? To enable it to handle something that hadn't been envisaged when it was first designed... Multiple sites...

Also, during this time many of the peripheral modules had received further work, with the contact module in particular, ending up more like an online first line of support system. It was renamed to suit as a result.

In December 2001, major work began to introduce the "movie Archaeology" feature, to improve many of the user modules, and to prepare the core modules for many more exciting new features planned for 2002. By January 13th, 2002, all the engine work had been completed and the database entries researched and entered.

The first version of a long awaited search feature had just been introduced and in the following week was rolled out to the site users. To enable this, version 2.7 was operational and the site was poised to implement the new archaeology feature.

This was finally rolled out on Friday 1st Febuary. During the week previous, final coding adjustments were made to the way that the engine presented locations info and a number of other page presentation improvements were made, including moving the soundtrack section, improving the DVD and "cool stuff" links as well as introducing a "splash" screen to encourage users to be patient when loading the pages.

Due to these continual improvements, we believed that PageBuild, by the first anniversary of it's live implementation (on March 11th 2002), was not only the cheapest, but also among the smartest movie site engines out there.

And so it remained. Constantly being developed in small steps ...Until the final version, which was 2.7

...In late 2005, work started on a brand new replacement, codenamed C21...

-Nick Alaway, Webmaster.