This is a short description on the technical side of The Global FlyFisher.
The site has existed for many, many years - like in since 1994 in its really basic form. Back then it was first a text document, which was sent to people inquiring about Danish sea trout fishing, but soon developed into a bunch of static HTML-files - the most common way of storing web sites back then. It also developed into something much bigger thanks to a merger between three different sites.
From this constantly growing number of static pages - in essence individual documents - the site evolved into a more modern site served by so called scripts and with data stored in a database. The scripts would pick information from the database, construct the HTML and send it to the users. The system was home made, programmed in PHP and worked OK for a start, but had to be developed to be faster and more feature rich as the need appeared and the site expanded.
Keeping all the balls in the air and developing the site within these frames proved to be too much, and in the autumn 2015 the old home made code had to give way to a modern Open Source CMS - Content Management System.
I chose Drupal for the task, mostly because I work with this system every day to make a living, but also because Drupal is a system, which is perfect for exactly what the Global FlyFisher is: an online magazine with quite a lot of varied content, a rich set of facilities and a fair number of users.
The site runs on a virtual server with the hosting company Linode. The server is a Debian Linux installation running an Apache web server and a MySQL database. The Drupal is a version 7 with a number of contributed modules, but I also had to develop a small number of custom modules to handle tasks unique to this site. The theme is home made for the purpose, and actually technically pretty simple, which is what I prefer.
