What has Changed with rasstech.net V3

This is a changelog and review of rasstech.net's most recent website update. Much has changed on the back end of the website, vastly increasing the integrity of the website. There were many features that were thinly held together, mostly related to not using Wagtail's Streamfield feature. The main goal of the update was to implement Streamfields. This took so long because multiple custom streamfields were also required to allow the site to function on any usable level. We also wrote in a robots.txt and sitemap generator; all sites should use these if they want to achieve a high SEO (search Engine Optimization) score. A higher SEO score will bump the website up in random google searches for similar content. As a result, rasstech.net should now pop up much higher in google. Another great backend feature is the added google analytics capability with the admin menu. This will let the admin monitor where traffic is coming from and the general analytics of the page interaction.

Of the many jerry rigged features on the old website, the main menu and footer menu were maybe the worst. The new menu is much more powerful as it no longer requires the admin to modify the HTML templates to add or remove pages. The old HTML template system was completely scrapped for a much more powerful wagtail based system. As a result, %95 of the websites content is now hosted on the SQL database rather than within the HTML templates. The DroneMaker page was changed from a normal wagtail page, to an index. This functions in the exact same way as the Blog index, so it is much better for listing multiple completed projects. There is new featured section of the homepage which takes any Dronemaker or Blog posts that have the "featured" tick box filled and posts them on the landing page. The new Carousel Streamfield is great for showing content that may not require its own blog post, these carousels can be easily placed anywhere, including blog posts. You can read about the other Changed in this update in the Changelog below.

Figure 1: A look at the new Wagtail Admin menu with each of the pages listed, notice the Dronemaker and Blog pages are listed as indexes. You will also see the new analytics option in the bottom of the list of functions.

The Experience using Django as a Web Framework

Well we are not going to say Django is an easy platform to use. There is entirely too much fiddling with backend features for Django to be considered approachable to any average blogger or business person. It is clearly meant for developers who are dedicated to running and maintaining websites. That being said, we are wholeheartedly thrilled that we've stuck with our commitment to Django vs Wordpress or Squarespace. Truthfully, we could have achieved many of the labour intensive features implemented on this update years ago by using Wordpress. The only difference is now we have a complete control of the content platform, and we don't have a million plug in menus. These notorious plug-ins slow the site down and threaten catastrophic failure if they update out of tune. Not to mention how annoying they are to navigate around and the absolute hustle Wordpress constantly runs to sell you features.

Rasstech.net continues to be a static content website, eventually there may be interactive content, but this is good enough for the next year or so. We have some cool plans to try and implement a little javascript game on the homepage, and maybe a store, but that is for another day. The beauty about using a python based framework is that there is huge potential to implement machine learning and applied form applications directly within the framework of the website.

Figure 2: Demonstrating how Streamfield blocks display for generating a blog post. Notice the "Featured" tick box which lets posts be displayed on the Home page.

Changelog

1. Brought in Wagtail Streamfields to make content
2. Changed Navbar from html template based to wagtail django tags
3. Changed all static pages from unique html templates to wagtail page generation based
4. Added dronemaker as a blog index wagtail page
5. Added "featured" tick box to new blog pages, this enables both dronemaker, and blog posts to be featured on the homepage
6. Made the Home page much more useful, and capable of holding streamfields and featured content
7. Created carousel streamfield, which can be included on all page types
8. Added "wagalytics" which allows admin console based google analytics to be served to the admin
9. Added robots.txt file located at https://www.rasstech.net/robots.txt this increases SEO score by giving crawler bots instructions
10. Added auto generating sitemap at https://www.rasstech.net/sitemap.xml which is a very important to increasing SEO score with Google
11. Added Executive Cards to contact page which allows admins to add new executives to the contact page from the admin console
12. Added a more robust Richtext streamfield with many new formatting features
13. Started using an updated Database which allows FTS5 search functions, should allow search functions and maybe crawlers to index website better