Are there any Novosti?

Yes there are!

Portal novosti (Novosti = News) is on-line edition of Independant serbian weekly Novosti (Samostalni srpski tjednik Novosti) published by Serbian national council (Srpsko narodno vijeće). Those who haven't heard about Novosti, favourite law suit target from lonely right-wingers, orto-liberals and ocasional ego-trippers from the left political spectrum, probably live 'someplace else' than Croatia. Although, Novosti are read in other parts of the world as well. An anegdote can confirm that. Some time ago we were contacted by a colleague who works and lives in Jordan. His question was why the portal doesn't work. After investigating the issue we found out that it was blocked by Jordan national internet provider company. To us, that seemed like a solution: "hej, just get in touch with your provider", but no, Jordan is a kingdom and provider is under direct control. You can not just ask the provider to unblock a domain that was taken down. Anyway, if you do not know about Novosti then you either live in your own happy bubble or somewhere in a kingdom, and you will not read this article anyway.

For us, Novosti play an important role in Croatian media landscape and because of that we've been their proud tech support provider for many years. That's why we were quite happy when got querried to team up with local agency Paraberau and do a full re-design of the portal. The task was not an easy one. There was a lot of demanding work, but most important of all it had to be done. The actual version of the portal was made seven years ago. Although it seemed like it can endure for another seven years, the code below the deck was screaming for update and visual intervention in realively minimalistic design of the portal has made it much more readable.

Our task was to write a completely new codebase and administration that will run the portal. Novosti allow two lettering sets, cyrilics and latinics at the same time, which made the task even more interesting. Also, we had to connect the portal with an allready established scheme of publishing articles in the printed version of Novosti, so a custom import tool had to be built. In the end, there was a complex data migration, et voilà, are there any Novosti? Yes there are!