lexpress.mu fait peau neuve

Welcome back!

Here’s some news that you might probably discover by yourself while surfing the Mauritian web.

The old buggy version of l’express.mu, online since the 1st November 2008, has finally been replaced. A new version silently rolled in yesterday and a first quick glance at the code showed that it is being powered by Drupal, one of the most famous open-source CMS available freely on the net.

Some last words about the old one

Friends sometimes told me that l’express needed to hire me for finding ‘bugs’ on their old site. In fact, I guess that I’m always the unlucky one to fall right into bugs (and problems). You can read the article dedicated to their launch in 2008. Yeah the blog is the best way to keep  track of the events in the country :=)

Some of you might still remember the database connectivity issues on the first day itself and during the same day, the site was put back into maintenance mode. lol. And then, during months or perhaps years, the site displayed random images instead of the correct ones. Most of the time, the results were quite funny. A few recent ones:

On other days:

And it did happen that a few serious and unforgivable things happened. Like displaying picture of someone else instead of the person who really passed away. RIP:

I know that human errs and bugs do exist. What I found the most disgusting is that lexpress never published any apology. Or even a small notice in some corner.

 Let’s forget about the past

First of all, no mobile version. At least, not from my devices because neither my Nexus 7 nor my HTC Chacha could detect one.  Next, a quick glace at the code showed that the site’s is powered by Drupal 7. I wonder if it is a default or free or paid theme, but no credits were displayed anywhere. But one thing that strikes me is the similarity with The Guardian. (Credits to Fadil. btw hi! Need to catch up, soon!)

Your views?

IMHO, this latest version does not really brings anything new, at least, not the hype I expected. Usually, when something new happens, people expect “something new” that’s bring real value in terms of content, user interface and features. Not a hastily designed and untested site which is uploaded just to override the previous one. Did you have a careful look at the banner? And the footer? Why untested? Because a quick tour on the first page itself showed that neither the Facebook nor the twitter link are correct.

I’m not going into deeper or technical analysis. Perhaps you might want to?

What do you think of the web site as a reader?