Coburg Historical Society

A friend of mine who's a member of the Coburg Historical Society said they needed a site done and I was happy to oblige. The result is an attractive and easy to update site, hosted within the limitations of Vicnet.

Light n Easy ends

Since completing the site Light n Easy is no longer being supported and it's domain is now pointed to a dodgy e-commerce shop (like what happened to Qdos Landscape's domain).

Closure of Vicnet

Vicnet closed in 2014 and sometime afterwards the Coburg Historical Society moved onto a new WordPress site hosted by WordPress.com at coburghistoricalsociety.wordpress.com which is an excellent way to get your WordPress website online for free.

As for Vicnet, WordPress.com is limited compared to your own hosting, but for most club's it's a well supported and easy to use version of WordPress that is enough and is easy for volunteers to look after.

Website Beginnings

The hosting is provided by Vicnet who cater to the needs of community groups in Victoria. PHP is provided but not MySQL. A CMS, Light n Easy, is pre-installed and does not need a database. There is a version available that does use a database if you prefer.

This was my first build using Light n Easy CMS, and I found it very good. It's fantastic for beginners and very easy to set up. There are no "users" and there is only one password to access everything.

Any HTML page can be used as a template. All you have to do is insert various tags which the CMS uses to insert your content. There are so many templates available, you probably won't need to make your own. I used the "Zenlike" template and changed the top image to one showing the society's museum.

Light n Easy is the ideal choice for hosting which has limited space (Vicnet provides only 10MBytes) and there is no database access. If you have better hosting I think WordPress is the better way to go.