York Stories is powered by WordPress. I used the Parabola theme as a base and developed a ‘child theme’ from that.
For the first seven years, the site was hand coded as a static HTML site (XHTML and CSS). (Its very first incarnation (now the 2004 archive) used tables for layout. Sooo long ago.)
It went more blog-like in late 2011, and for two years updates were added via the marvellous Flatpress – a flat-files based blogging engine.
This site somehow managed to exist for almost a decade without a database behind it. In late 2013 I finally got around to taking on the mammoth task of converting the whole thing (minus those tabled layout 2004 pages) into a WordPress site. Which involved various complexities of combining a couple of hundred blog posts from Flatpress with a few hundred more old-style static pages, trying to get the two looking not too different from one another, and also integrating with new WordPress-added content. Followed by the fun of creating hundreds of 301 redirects and grappling with the mysteries of regular expressions.
There are a few issues still to deal with, at some point. If you’ve found any major problems or found a broken link that has disappointed you, I can be contacted via email.