Transition to a content management system

The GENUKI service has now been running for 20 years, and we are still using our original method of updating our pages. But time has moved on and a number of better ways have been developed for providing pages. These new ways, based on the use of "Content Management Systems", require much less technical expertise. So we are changing to the use of DRUPAL, a highly-regarded and widely-used Content Management Sytem, in order to ease the task of current GENUKI maintainers, and to make it easier for us to recruit additional people to maintain GENUKI. Hopefully we will be able to bring on board people who know about family history even if they have little prior experience of web page creation, as a lot of the computer expertise that has to date been involved in maintaining GENUKI pages is removed from the job.

In the initial transition we are attempting to keep things as similar as possible to the previous look and feel of the GENUKI system, but there have to be a few minor changes as part of the process. What GENUKI users should see is more consistency across the counties and  a new DRUPAL-based search facility. Then in the future we will have a framework that enables us to provide additional ways of viewing GENUKI's data.