Last Friday we had a meeting and made a few decisions for the future of this site. First of all we are doing away with php, which is my first and foremost job right now. Second, we are pretty much set on using Drupal which is a more eventual solution. Third, we need to possibly redesign or revamp all the sites to have a more standard look and feel. To accomplish this I'll need to hold further meetings to begin to figure out and architect the information so it's logical and follows a standard.
Today, I continued to clean up the SERE site and deleted and moved around many files. It's currently working on the testing server as a php site for the most part. Once I changed all of the jsp extentions to php I realized this will create many problems for anyone linking directly to the sites pages. In order to combat this problem I've taken the liberty to setup custom 404 error pages. After much deliberation with Gary, we decided that it is in fact possible to be seo friendly and have custom 404 pages. They had to set it up correctly from the apache end of things so it sets the header to a 404 error. Now that this is all finally set-up I'm planning on creating a custom 404 page that not only looks like the rest of the site, but will have an if statement that looks for what page they are trying to get to and then spits out a custom message that will forward them to the correct page. So if they are looking for news.jsp the if statement will see this and then set a link to news.php on the fly. This way people will still easily be able to find the pages they want to find.
I also setup Linda Mearns and the ISSE scientists with an internal wordpress blog. I setup all the users with the same username as their ucas passwords, unfortunately I was unable to sync it with the actual database to pull in the passwords so it all has to be setup manually.