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Charlotte Amalie
Thursday, March 28, 2024
HomeNewsLocal newsSource Leaping Into the Next Iteration

Source Leaping Into the Next Iteration

There’s a cyber-world joke that says a year in human life is equal to 500 years on the internet.

That means that our current content management system is 4,500 years old. It has served us well.

But it is clearly time for a change.

We have spent the last two years researching and designing the best and most cost-effective means to take the leap from a highly custom designed open source content management system to a more accessible, up to date, affordable system that will meet the need to better interface with social media while upholding our integrity as a reliable, decades-old newspaper of general circulation.

When the Source moved from its original content management system to Drupal, at the time a brilliant new system, the internet technicians who built it used custom designs that have no parallel or easy fix in today’s online world. Hence our move to Word Press, a widely respected system that aligns with the internet’s established axiom as a medium that eliminates the need for hundreds of thousands of dollars or even millions, for voices to be heard. Democracy.

We launched the Source at a time when and because the Virgin Islands had been infiltrated by a communications mogul who used his many holdings and financial resources to bend the truth and people to his advantage.

Because of the low cost back then – in 1998 – we were able to birth an independent news organization for almost nothing.

Today, enterprising young people have built multimillion-dollar businesses based on internet development.

Thanks to a group of Source associates– led by one highly skilled, patient man in the Midwest – we have been able to affect our migration and upgrade in a way that was fiscally possible for this financially independent, unaffiliated, free and therefore advertising dependent news publication.

We have attempted to keep our design very similar to our previous look, while incorporating 4,500 years of development behind the screen.

There will be glitches and ongoing development to find fixes. Full disclosure: our new search engine functions in an entirely different way with fewer bells and whistles. We spent considerable time and resources attempting to find a parallel product. We will. But in the interest of time and security we decided to make the trip to the new system and work on a search engine solution once that was completed.

The move to Word Press that will take place over the next few days is just the beginning. Given the many years of development that has taken place since our last migration, we have many innovations yet to come as a result of this move. You will see some of them immediately and more all the time.

We are very excited. We are even more grateful to the readers and who have supported the Source for nearly two decades. Read on.

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