After more than six months of work, our site upgrades are complete. All of the content has been transferred, and we have given the site a fresh, new look that we hope you will like. We have attempted to maintain consistency, so that any bookmarks you have made to pages or other content will still work. A few of the page addresses may have changed, however, so we apologize in advance and ask you to update any links you have to our site.
One significant change: you no longer need to register in order to access the downloadable materials. In fact, for technical reasons (which are outlined below if you are interested), all login information from our previous version has been deleted. Those who wish to remain members will need to register again.
Users can now submit suggestions for useful reference links. If you have found a particularly good—and reliable—site for information about a particular world explorer, you can send it to us on our submission page.
We have also taken this opportunity to clean up a few errors that we found, and to update and complete some of the content that had been “under construction” for longer than we would have liked. Most specifically, there are a few items in the Webquest which should now be more useful to teachers and students.
For the technical-minded among you, this site has been built on the Drupal platform for many years. While we still greatly appreciate the power and usability of that product, the maintenance and update process was complex, and it led to problems with outdated modules and security problems. Managing spam was also becoming more of an issue, as many of you found in some inappropriate comments on student pages.
We have always been a fan and happy user of WordPress for several other projects. For a long time, however, it would have been difficult to build a site like All About Explorers on that platform. The most recent updates, as well as the availability of more flexible themes and some powerful plugins (such as PodsCMS) convinced us to make the leap.
We hope you will find the new version of All About Explorers even more useful and easier to navigate. If you do happen to find a few glitches, some content that is out of place, or missing resources, don’t hesitate to contact us and let us know. Likewise, if you have suggestions for improving the site or features you would like to see, we are always looking for feedback.
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