Sweet Home 3D Launches Redesigned New Website with Blog, Forum, and Search Features. 2009

Discover the Enhanced Sweet Home 3D Website

On August 1, 2009, Sweet Home 3D unveiled its revamped website, introducing several new features to better serve its user community. The update included the addition of a blog for news and tips, a user forum for community discussions, and a search engine to easily navigate content. These enhancements aimed to provide a more dynamic and interactive platform for users to engage with the software and each other.

Dynamic pages

Dynamic pages managed with JSP technology replaced previous static HTML pages. This will greatly improve the management of menus and localization, and will help to add new services in the future (wouldn’t it be nice to automatically retrieve 3D models available on web site in Sweet Home 3D? 😉

Blog

A blog is now accessible at https://www.sweethome3d.com/blog/ . I’ll use it to speak about major events like this one, future releases of Sweet Home 3D, features being tested in Sweet Home 3D,… This blog is powered by Peeble, probably the best free JSP blog engine among the ones listed on java-source.net: easy configuration, small but good documentation, customizable JSP and CSS files.

Forum

A new forum available at http://www.sweethome3d.eu/support/forum/ replaces the SourceForge.net forums (SourceForge announced they will remove them sooner or later). All the 530 posts published on the old forum were copied to the new forum. Powered by mvnForum, a free complete customizable JSP forum, it supports all the features you would expect from a modern forum (BBCode, user language dynamically changed, security…).

Search engine

A search engine was added at http://www.sweethome3d.eu/search/. Powered by Nutch and Apache Lucene, it will let you to find information on sweethome3d.eu web site and in sourceforge.net pages bound to Sweet Home 3D technology.

As a conclusion, here are a few reasons why I finally chose Java/JSP technology and not a nice PHP CMS like Joomla (as discussed previously with French users):

• As I know Java and JSP much much better than PHP (I even wrote a book about Java programming ;-), changing the pages of the existing web site was much easier and no style was lost in the existing texts.
• As a programmer, it was much more fun to introduce dynamic calls in a static web site and customize JSP applications, than fighting with Joomla as soon as I would have wanted something special.
• Finally, I took profit of this chance to test how to assemble various web applications on a web site. This can be achieved with contexts in JSP and I’m convinced now that contexts really help to keep the best modularity possible on a web site.

Many thanks to the community for their support.