As you surely have noticed, things look different here since some days.

Our site really got long in the tooth. Since we have nobody working full time on it, we always have difficulties keeping the site in an adequate state. Of course we put most of our time in the development of the robots — but we kept you in mind. Before we don’t have any time because of the running season, we now want to use the time to make some improvements.

The most important improvement is probably our “responsive” design. It means that the content of our page it automatically adjusted to your screen size. Smartphone users can now read our page without having their fingers hurt because of excessive scrolling.

The menu now follows your scrolling, so you have access to it at any time, no matter where you are reading on our page. Our website’s calendar is now automatically synced with SOGo, which is a groupware solution we have used internally for a while now.

Photos are a considerable problem for us. We would like to present you as many of them as possible, but it costs a lot of time to sort them, prepare them for the web and publish them in a good way. Therefore you will miss photos at many places. We even have more than thousands photos (yes, really!) of the last championships, which we want to release. In future people are asked to keep the camera only on a few interesting motives, but you may know how difficult it is to restrict yourself =)

From a technical point of view we already did a larger change some time ago: We replaced the free (as in beer), but restricted and increasingly less well maintained version of NextGen by the public domain plugin WPPA+, because we were increasingly dissatisfied with NextGen. (Those of you who visit us more regularly might have noticed that our gallery didn’t always work). WPPA+ is quite new and the functionality is already really great (means: we want to make some more changes). It was a lot of work to migrate the 1264 photos into the new system, unfortunately all titles and comments were lost during the procedure. It wasn’t worth for us to write a software which rescues this data. Also the order of the pictures isn’t optimal, as automatic ordering fails because of missing meta data — and we didn’t have time to order them manually.In the near feature we would like to add more photos successively and edit the existing ones. Just visit us from time to time!

tl;dr?

On the new website everything got better now, but nothing is perfect!

If you notices things which may not work as expected after the conversion, feel free to write us an email or a comment. We will prioritize by the amount of complains — and of course we take praises too 😉