ESN Satellite 3 released

ESN and Youth Agora released ESN Satellite 3, the new edition of the free website template for ESN sections.

The ESN Satellite project was born in 2006 out of a necessity to provide local organizations (sections) of the Erasmus Student Network with a tailored, nice, attractive, easy-to-administer, highly customizable website template. After a pilot phase conducted with a dozen selected sections, more than half of the ESN sections voluntarily switched to ESN Satellite within the first year, and now 200 out of the about 300 sections of ESN use ESN Satellite.

The first positive effect of the project was to create a standardized nice layout for the sections' websites; and a second one, made possible by this standardization, was the automatic aggregation of data into the ESN Galaxy: without any extra effort, all news and events posted to a local website were automatically aggregated on a common site. For the first time in history, the Erasmus Student Network had an online business card where you could show in real time what was going on in the network.

The new version, ESN Satellite 3, builds on this success story and comes with several new features, including a new graphic design, integration with the Give20 fundraising initiative, connection to the ESN Radio, optional integration with Facebook. There are good news for webmasters too: they will enjoy the new installation wizard, the fully customizable colors and elements, the availability of many optional preinstalled features and several usability improvements. Support relies on mutual collaboration tools, like our Google Group and our wiki.

The same vision that led the Youth Agora members to volunteer in building and maintaining all versions of ESN Satellite and the ESN Galaxy will inspire the development of the Master Template and the European Campus: a usable, standardized, collaboratively supported template on one side and automatic aggregation facilities on the other one.

A public demo of ESN Satellite is available at http://demo.youthagora.org/satellite