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New Site


Pete

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Hi folks

 

I'm not sure of the level of interest, but I realise I alluded to and even released some screens of the new site design/functionality I'm working on a while back.

 

It's been a lot more work than I thought (3 months work!), but I'm in the home stretch with it now. I'm not going to give an estimate as to how long it'll take to finish, but the fact that I'm working on the new forum layout means that the majority of the rest of the site is out of the way.

 

The Files section, which is currently sporting an old design, will get some love after the new site launch - if I tackled that as well then we'd be here all year waiting for the new layout.

 

There are some nice things to look forward to - the main forum-related one is the new version of the forum software with some useful (and some superfluous) new features which is very nice to use indeed. When I do the switch I might take a backup of the current forum software, stick it on a CD and burn it on a fire because the inability for it to correctly display new posts is annoying me that much :blush:

 

Anyway, that's where I'm up to.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Just as a heads-up on progress: I might be doing the switch tomorrow.

 

There's still a little way to go and, due to the amount of things that have been changed, it will require several hours of downtime (you will see errors :D) and will most likely result in a slightly broken site as there's so much for me to remember to do - even with the help of a list in front of me I'm not convinced I'll remember everything, but I'll give it a go.

 

Whether it ends up being tomorrow or whether it's early next week depends on the last few bits I'm working on but it's tantalisingly close now.

 

I thought I'd best give some warning since this will be the longest interruption to normal service on the site since 2008 when I did the last big upgrade.

 

There will also doubtless be some layout bugs that appear afterwards - most likely in the forum theme as it's so complicated (I think I've checked it all but you can never be sure). I'm sure you guys will let me know if anything looks weird and I can easily fix any issues as they appear.

 

I'm quite excited about it - it's not got all of the things I had planned to add, but I think it's more important to launch it at this stage or else I'll be adding bits on for months and never finish it :argh:

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I'm carrying on with this today - some of the last "little" bits are taking a long time, but they need to be done right and they will hopefully promote more article and news discussion (as long as you guys don't fear change, the new system is neat).

 

One other thing I feel I should warn you about is that I've not found a way yet with the new forums to have the editor background display in anything other than a blinding, brilliant white. That looks nice on the light theme, but is a bit jarring on the dark one. There doesn't appear to be any apparent way around it as it's in an iframe, so you have been warned :argh:

 

There is possibly a way around it with some javascript, but if I tackle that it will be after the launch as I don't want little things like this holding it all up.

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One other thing I feel I should warn you about is that I've not found a way yet with the new forums to have the editor background display in anything other than a blinding, brilliant white.

*quickly shields eyes horrifiedly* Gah, my precious retinas!

 

::

 

This heinous conduct will not be tolerated! Repent!!

 

*turns into a bat and fades back into the cool, comforting dark*

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Welcome back everyone!

 

There are still some issues I'm resolving here and there, and there was a panicky 45 minutes in the middle when the forum upgrade broke - several times scare2.gif but it seems to be working now.

 

The homepage needs some news articles, so I'm just off to link the last few back in.

 

I also noticed the quote boxes on the forums are a little off, so they're on my list too.

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There's still some weirdness going on but I need sleep before I look into it.

 

Since the upgrade, all the paragraph spacing for the 100,000 posts has vanished. The only way to get that back is by trying another conversion (annoyingly it worked fine when I first tested it).

 

I'll comment more when I know more, but if it does come to another conversion then any posts made since the upgrade will be wiped, so please be aware of that.

 

Not the best state to leave things in, I know. Sorry :argh:

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The upgrade did mess up avatars in some cases so they will need to be re-uploaded. I'm not sure why they couldn't have just had the upgrade script do that bit right though - most odd.

 

The majority of it is fine. Glad everyone likes it and I shall be attempting to fix the posts today, although not sure at what time or how long it'll take.

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