As Stewartstown.com approaches its two-year anniversary, major changes are in the works. Most of these changes will become active in November. The ride may be a little bumpy, but we’ll try to keep disruptions to a minimum.

First though, here are some statistics about Stewartstown.com’s first 2 years as provided by our web host:

Home page visitors to date: 30,000
Total page views to date: 200,000 (does not count forums)
Current average unique visitors per week: 450

Now, about the upcoming changes. We have long considered using a content management system (CMS) engine to present site content to site visitors. The main reason we have not done so is that we could not find a free or inexpensive one that was solid and had sufficient ongoing development behind it. Recently a new Open Source CMS effort called PostNuke began as a fork from PHP-Nuke that is already among the best available, even though the current release is not even considered to be beta level. We’ve decided to take some risk and adopt this system for Stewartstown.com.

So what does that mean? Here are some highlights:

1. All site content will be stored in a database, thus adding, editing, deleting, etc., can all be done without any development tools (html editors, FrontPage, ftp...).

2. Site visitors have the opportunity to become registered members. Among other benefits, registered members will be able to submit articles directly online for possible inclusion on the site, post on the new forums, and eventually even select an alternative appearance for the site.

3. No advertising will appear, even on the forums. Since we will now host our own forums rather than using a third party, the mandatory banner ads and “slide-under” ads will no longer appear.

4. You will be able to send/receive private messages to/from other registered members. This allows private communications between residents without posting an email address.

5. A new site search capability will allow you to search all or part of the site using keywords.

Because of the magnitude of the changes, including switching to a different web host, there may be times during November when things just don’t work quite right. We’re doing everything we can to keep disruptions to a minimum, but the best laid plans sometimes go awry.

Our goal is to have a site that is easy for the community to actively participate in and that is also easy for us to maintain. There may be some pain in the process, but we believe the gains will be worth it.