Changes to the site

In August 2009 the Te Ara site moved to the open-source Drupal content management platform and made a number of relatively minor changes to the site navigation.

URLs to pages have been simplified and now appear in the form http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/story-name (or /mi/ for the Māori interface).
A comprehensive redirection is in place and any bookmarked Story links should not break, but please do update your bookmarks. Links deeper than a Story page may not be resolved correctly but our Error page gives a number of helpful suggestions.

The search engine has been improved - it's faster and more accurate.

Navigation

• You can now browse Te Ara's contents (grouped in a variety of ways) on any page by clicking on the 'Browse Te Ara' command at the very top of the page.
• The Short Story icon and link has been consistently positioned on all pages, to the right of the title.
• The Short Story has a new 'lightbox' treatment.
• Biography links (to the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography website) appear at the foot of the Story pages, and the Biographies Gallery has been removed.
• To move to an image or other media item from a text page, click on the thumbnail image (no change).
• To move to the text from an image or other media item, click the 'Back to story' button.
• Images or media which are grouped together have improved internal navigarion (thumbnails appear above the main image).
• Further Sources pages have been placed within the Story navigation.
• Related Stories are now managed through an automated process based on key words on the page. This is still subject to refinement, and we've signalled the lack of human intervention in the process by labelling the feature 'You may be interested in...' No guarantees, but there may be a serendipity...

If any of the navigation is unclear, try reading through our How to use Te Ara page.

There have also been a number of small cosmetic changes to improve the look of the site.
We'd be pleased to have your reactions to the changes. Emails us at TeAra@mch.govt.nz