March 29, 2024

The nth iteration of the War Relics Website is now online - with a feature on the Cavalry Tank Museum at Ahmednagar.

For the nth time again in ten years, the “War Relics” Site  has had to be changed.. I have lost count on how many times this had to be upgraded. The original website was plain HTML – then it was moved Mambo CMS – Mambo, as with Joomla is maintenance intensive and after a while it fell by the wayside in terms of updates – though the template etc was quite cool.

A few years ago, when the hosting provider started supporting the Gallery 2 Software (http://gallery.menalto.com), I was quick to jump on that option as I had quite a few installs running on the Bharat Rakshak website. However there were many configuration problems and despite the relative ease of use compared to Mambo, there were still lot of other tweaks and buttons that needed to be done, taking time and effort. Moreover it was easy to get sucked into additional nifty features – like the Google Maps module which was real cool, but was work intensive. Still I stuck with it, but at one point the installation broke and I could not get it working.

The Gallery team had meanwhile brought out Version 3 of the software, that was completely re-written from the ground up. This version is spiffy, very fast and light on the shared hosting server and was easier to use – but the current host initially could not support it due to using an older version of PHP. After waiting half an year, they finally allowed us to load the Version 3 of the software and I am glad to state that we used it to launch the latest iteration of the Relics Gallery.

Unfortunately in the transition, all the caption information has been lost, because the older Gallery install was not in working order and the migration tool did not work. Also lost was the Google Maps feature – which is either a blessing or a curse depending on whos looking at it. The website however is a joy to use and I have taken the opportunity to get rid of the multi-site installs of Gallery 2 and put everything in one place. So relics shares the root space with the older SEAC and Civil Aircraft Galleries.

What better way to kickstart the nth avatar of the Relics site than to put a photo feature of the Cavalry Tank Museum at Ahmednagar?. The fantastic collection of photographs have been contributed by rahulm of the Bharat Rakshak Forums. (Not to be confused with Rahul_M!). Our thanks to rahulm for bringing in detailed public view the first ever extensive photocoverage of the Cavalry Tank Museum at Ahmednagar.

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