Website update 1/6/22

Today we’ve made a really big update to the site including a full theme change and work to change over what we use as our LMS.

Yesterday it was noticed that the LMS (Learning Management System) we were using was once again playing silly (and was again broken) with another plugin that we had just installed. This was the straw that broke the camels back, I’ve personally written over 300 lines of style edits to try and integrate this LMS into the site and this is a plugin I’ve also invested hundreds of pounds and many hours in to have on this site and to have across other sites. I’ve had enough with it.

Last night a new LMS was decided on after some furious searching but the one picked required implementing a new theme onto the website in order to get the full advantage of the LMS. Today this was implemented and as far as possible we’ve tried to make it look and feel like the old site but better! To be clear there was no issues with the old template – it was simply the fact of having to install a new template to get the features we wanted.

This style change has taken most of today, but I believe that it should be for the better in the long run and should provide us with some excellent new features to play around with.

This change has invariably led to other tasks that now need doing, such as transferring the courses across from the old LMS to the new LMS and also ensuring that other parts of the site work as expected. There will also need to be time invested in understanding the features of the new LMS and integrating these into the site.

So even though we’ve gone slightly backwards today in terms of site progress, in the long run these changes will allow better forward momentum.

Work will continue on the site over night to try and get it back to where it needs to be and there will be an update when any new features are implemented as part of this change.

As you can see, there is an active investment strategy for the site to provide others with free computer science education. If you’d like to contribute towards our goal of proving free computer science education, please consider supporting our server costs via our Ko-fi page – any amount is genuinely welcome! https://ko-fi.com/computerscienced

Many thanks for your support and keep your eyes peeled on the site for the next update!