It’s Fes­ti­val time again… in two weeks, the 2006 Perth Inter­na­tional Arts Fes­ti­val web site will be launched. So right now we’re mak­ing (mostly minor) mod­i­fi­ca­tions to the sys­tem and fin­ish­ing off the new func­tion­al­ity. And madly try­ing to fin­ish off the new design and get that approved.

The site is quite huge, and has a custom-written man­age­ment sys­tem on the back­end that lets the Fes­ti­val staff update news and events as they need. We did the site in Fuse­box 3 (this was way back in 2002 — we’re prepar­ing for our fourth Fes­ti­val) and I get a huge kick out of open­ing up files and see­ing a Fuse­doc that shows the file hasn’t been mod­i­fied since 2002.

Man, that is so cool… the sys­tem has been run­ning nearly four years and some files have only ever been mod­ded once. Some have never been changed. I don’t know why I get so excited to see that, but I do. On the other hand, some pages on the front end have changed 17,000 times every year so we don’t bother keep­ing the Fuse­doc in them up to date, or you’d have to scroll past 5 pages of com­ments to get to the 15 lines of code.

And again, another devel­oper is learn­ing Cold­Fu­sion (and Fuse­box 3 at the same time) by copy­ing one of our exist­ing cir­cuits and chang­ing it to suit the new require­ments. Al will be the fourth per­son in our organ­i­sa­tion to do that, although Ben is the only one who has become a Cold­Fu­sion spe­cial­ist as a result.