Former Tentative Sites.
A minor point, but I note that the pages for "Former Tentative Sites" still contain words which are only appropriate if the site were still on the Tentative List. Of course this is because the format was cloned from that source but it might be worth changing them to avoid confusion - I found myself looking at a site this morning and had to double check if I had inadvertently switched to a T List! (This can be deduced from the "history" if the latest entry there is "Retracted". On which point - We changed this word to "Withdrawn" on the Country history page - it needs changing here too.)
e.g "Lion of Brunswick is part of the Tentative list of Germany in order to qualify for inclusion in the World Heritage List."
better to say "Lion of Brunswick was formerly on the Tentative List of Germany. See "Site History""
Similarly the blank (!) map states "The coordinates shown for all tentative sites were produced as a community effort. They are not official and may change on inscription."
What has been decided about how to handle the coordinates for T List sites which we have mapped which then become "Former T List sites" - will they still retain their "site map" and, if so, with what colour dot? To do so raises the issue of whether they should appear on the country map etc also. It could be said that this would "complicate" that map, though an alternative view might be that it is useful/interesting extra info which we ought to show at the country level - views?? If former T List sites are always going to have a "blank" map then it might be better to remove it from the section completely? If we are going to retain the information for sites removed after we identified the coordinates then the words should be changed appropriately and we need to consider whether we (over time!!) should collect the coordinates for sites removed earlier as well?

Solivagant

I did yet another refactoring including caching of most pages... Els and I will have to find some time to review and deploy it.... Not this weekend though ;)

Wording stuff can be sorted quite easily.

The "Click here for a short description of the site, as delivered by the state party." doesn't work either in the case of "Former Tentative Sites"! In the case of sites removed since c Sep 2008 then Wayback machine links to this Web site's page and those sites could relatively easily be chased back to obtain their UNESCO description using the archived pages. I have just checked and the T List Data Base page on the UNESCO Web site is archived back to Nov 2006 so that would provide a more direct way of finding the original descriptions of removed T List sites from then onwards.
Do we want to do this? How many Former T List sites are there and what were their withdrawal dates? If a list of these were produced then we could work through it in our own time.

I would find it desirable to have a link to the archived version of the official description on the UNESCO website. On the other hand, I wouldn't like to see the coordinates of former TWHS on the country map. For some countries (e.g. USA, China, Spain, Italy, Mexico) this would obscure the map, making it incomprehensible. Notwithstanding, I wouldn't mind having the coordinates on the former TWHS page, but I don't think I could find the motivation to look them all up.

A minor ""logical" issue but a number of names are appearing twice in the "Recently Updated" section of the Community page when they have (apparently) only added 1 site to on their personal page (e.g Zhenjun Liu - May 1 x 2, Dirk-Pieter Apr 30 x 2, Clyde 29 Apr and May 1). Another (George Evangelou) made 2 updates on Apr 26 but no sites appear on his Web page list.

I noticed that, too. Need to program a bit fancier SQL to get that sorted out

The Forum software automatically detects Web site addresses and resolves them as hot links.
I know that it is proprietary software but how difficult would it be to achieve the same for section of this site concerned with the posting of Reviews?
For those of us who do not eat and breath HTML in our day to day existence, creating the appropriate characters to achieve this when we post our reviews is a step too far!!

Solivagant

There is one major release still due on the web front end. I have been travelling too much of late. The next topics would be SEO and input and converting links should be feasible ;) Generally, you can just type <a href='http://url'>text</a>.

And here we go... Els and I have been working on (another) full refresh of the site. We have ironed out most issues, but would like to get some community feedback...

A lot what we have done is under the hood and not directly visible to you. E.g. we revised the releases to make it a bit easier to move files between development (my computer), test and prod. I think we succeeded, but better to ask Els on that one. ;)

We also changed the architecture and how content is split between files. This should make it a lot easier to work in parallel on different parts of the site. Els and I repeatedly had issues where our versions didn't align anymore even though we were working on very different parts of the site. But obviously, this will only concern you if you develop yourself (feel free to help) or if the page throws and error...

Now the nice stuff...

Caching:
The whole page can now be cached. Els can configure the caching intervals quite easily herself. The files are then taken from disk and not generated on the fly. Especially for static pages that rarely change this is useful. But even for the main page having a short caching interval (10min) will help to reduce server load a bit and make the page a bit more responsive. A tiny downside is that not all new content will show immediately, E.g. it will take a while before your new sites will show on your profile page. You can expedite the process by clicking on the refresh icon shown in the footer of each page. I will revise the data entry pages and probably also embed the recaching of impacted pages there.

URL Paths
The whole physical folder structure was abolished. Now all files are rewritten via .htaccess. Sounds technical, but this is what it looks like. Note /new/ is only for testing.

Old:
http://worldheritagesite.org/sites/site.php?id=1253
New (by ID default, by Name additional):
1) http://worldheritagesite.org/list/id/1253
2) http://worldheritagesite.org/list/Gamzigrad-Romuliana

Old:
http://www.worldheritagesite.org/profiles/provile.php?User=7
New
1) http://worldheritagesite.org/community/Solivagant (default)
2) http://worldheritagesite.org/community/id/7

Note: All old links should continue to work. They will be redirected to the new URL structure, though.

3) More Information per Page
Several pages now use the underlying API to provide more information. E.g. per site you can check who visited. Each year will show you how the list looked at the time ... Feel free to explore.

4) Standardized Map Feature
I cleaned that part up, too.

5) Some other things. E.g. for our Top 25 there is now this:
http://worldheritagesite.org/ranking/top+travellers

If you want to test, please write an email to my forum name nfm??????@gmail.com. I will then give you access to our test sheet.

Els still needs to deploy the latest version and then testing can start.

If a page should contain more information let us know. It should be possible as most data is loaded via standardized APIs and caching should take care of performance bottle necks.

Looking forward to your feedback. The start link is deleted

It's live now. See http://worldheritagesite.org/

We seem to have lost "Reasons for inscription" - the link which takes us to the UNESCO web site entry??

It can be found in the right column via Unesco Reference: 1253

I had tried clicking on the "Full Name" which is also a link - thinking that would take me to the UNESCO site - but that did nothing

a. Confirm that the "Full Name" link doesn't seem to do anything
b. The "UNESCO Ref" link is perhaps not very intuitive - obviously those of us who use the site regularly will "learn" where everything is and it depends how much you want to design for "passing traffic". It would seem better to clarify that this leads to the UNESCO web page - this is really more important than the Ref No but by all means continue to show that as well.
c. The Tentative List page has a section called "Upcoming Inscriptions". More accurate to call it "Upcoming Nominations"?
d. When 1 of the years of "Upcoming Inscriptions" is chosen the page is headed "Nominated in 20XX". Better to say "Nominated For" ???
e. Of course - apart from the next year and, from around May of each year (when WHC papers are published) the next year as well, all the other years are based on info garnered from the web. Might it be worth having a bit of text after "Nominated for" stating something along the lines of "Based on UNESCO documentation and latest information gathered from the Web by Forum Members
f. The "Top Lists" section doesn't yet seem to be fully working on the "Els provided" test URL with no overview of Lists present
g. Glad that the Community section states "WHS enthusiasts" rather than "Top 25 Community Members" which in one of Nan's versions. There should be no suggestion that "topness" is a function of number of WHS seen. Is it still intended however to have a link to this from a Tab titled "Top Lists"? It isn't a "top List" in the same way as the others are, I personally would prefer not to have a sequenced list of members by visited sites at all as we do not for T List sites - or certainly give it less prominence (e.g provide an optional "sort" feature). The latest version seems to me to have far too much emphasis on "Position" and Numbers of sites seen" - but I understand that I will be in a minority on this. In my view it makes us too much like "Most Travelled People" etc which I won't even subscribe to and which seems to reduce the purpose of "Travelling" to a competition for the completion of a tick list!!

There are now two ways to access each page. By ID (for sites the default) or by name. I just wanted to have the named link showing on the page. That's why.

Re wording, I am up for anything. In the end Els has to decide what to name how.

Re rankings, it's the same data we already have. Actually community now by default shows the full list and not just the top 25. I just wanted to keep the arbitrary top 25 flying around (for those who care about that), so I added it to Top Lists/Rankings instead.

Sorting is generally no biggie to change for tables.

Bugs found:
* Rankings main page not loading
* Links in the header don't work either

I think we should follow the native speaker in this, Nan.
I´ll put an item at our bug tracking sheet.