Gov.uk named THE BEST THING Britain has made all year

[Sysman]

cough..

Link checker | drupal.org

Also, the site is written in Ruby on Rails, not Drupal

Sorry, which site is written in RoR?

The gov.uk preview/beta was definitely done in Wordpress and hosted in the US.

[minestrone]

It's exceptionally good because it completely eschews the frippery and excessive adornment that clutter so many sites, in favour of serving its primary purpose: to convey information as clearly and efficiently as possible.

As with so many things that appear simple and straightforward, this has only been achieved through an enormous amount of hard work by highly experienced designers, developers, user experience specialists, and not forgetting the infrastructure people that have put together a reliable platform for it to run on, and all at much less than most Government IT projects manage to spend on paper clips.

Obligatory disclosure: I know and, at other times and places, have worked with a number of people on the Gov UK team. They're some of the smartest, most talented, and most dedicated people I've ever had the pleasure of working with.

They also eschew alphabetical ordering.

[minestrone]

To me the thing is a complete feckin mess.

I have an opinion that using a website that continually changes layout and position of menus & number of menus etc is the same as a call center forwarding you round different people in different departments, you are constantly needlessly readjusting.

[Mich the Tester]

To me the thing is a complete feckin mess.

I have an opinion that using a website that continually changes layout and position of menus & number of menus etc is the same as a call center forwarding you round different people in different departments, you are constantly needlessly readjusting.

So send them an email and suggest a better layout.

[NickFitz]

Bang up to date, but I think the answer is that I visit new sites with NoScript turned on.

The Beeb do a decent job of working out when JS is disabled and issue an appropriate message.

Ah yes, I happen to have disabled JS in Chrome just now and I can see it. I'll mention that to them when I'm next in touch.

[doodab]

They are even tackling unemployment

https://www.gov.uk/jobsearch

Looks like C++ is booming....

https://jobsearch.direct.gov.uk/JobS...ndon&q=C%2B%2B

[NickFitz]

Sorry, which site is written in RoR?

The gov.uk preview/beta was definitely done in Wordpress and hosted in the US.

www.gov.uk is in RoR, and always has been AFAIK. Remember there are a lot of sites at somethingorother.gov.uk, all of which are gradually being phased out: www.gov.uk is the new one under which all the others will eventually be moved.

[Pondlife]

Ah yes, I happen to have disabled JS in Chrome just now and I can see it. I'll mention that to them when I send them an invoice for all the testing you get when you say a website is good on the internet..

FTFY

[NickFitz]

To me the thing is a complete feckin mess.

I have an opinion that using a website that continually changes layout and position of menus & number of menus etc is the same as a call center forwarding you round different people in different departments, you are constantly needlessly readjusting.

You're probably following links out to old sites that haven't been brought under www.gov.uk yet.

[vetran]

The broken link isn't on their site, so there's not much point them using that.

strange looks like it does the needfull.

The Link checker module extracts links from your content when saved and periodically tries to detect broken hypertext links by checking the remote sites and evaluating the HTTP response codes. It shows all broken links in the reports/logs section and on the content edit page, if a link check has been failed. An author specific broken links report is also available in "My Account".

Also, the site is written in Ruby on Rails, not Drupal

point taken read the link in earlier post, can't immediately see the technical detail on the gov.uk but as an example of a problem already fixed elsewhere and core to the sites design it does look like they reinvented the wheel not fixed the problem.

One assumes that they have a dedicated security team working on the site and worldwide security authorities reviewing it daily to look for holes?

Personally I would have used Drupal or similar and contributed to any modules I needed, that way I would be in a big pool of companies watching out for security issues.