Well, at this point, I have, for most point, finished the upgrading and changing the site. From an externals point of view, all it appears that was done upgrade the version (twice) and added some enhancements to the menus. Essentally, all I have been doing is the site back to where it was before, minus a few items.
The real changes are invisible except to those who care about HOW mods are added to the system. What I basically did, was return the site to virgin software and re-added our changes using some of the newer tools provided by vbulletin. There are no longer ANY code changes to vbulletin's code and only ONE? template is now modified. All other "effective" visual changes have been done using vbulletin "Hooks" to modfiy the necessary templates on the fly. If you look at the templates list, all templates, except "Postbit_Legacy" appear to be the original. Postbit_legacy ended up being too complicated to change on the fly, so we are using a greatly modified one. There are other templates that appear to be modified, but they are ones that are under our control or are used to make the on the fly changes.
So the new SOP will be not to apply any mods to the system that require manual code or template changes to vbulletin base code. That is why some changes were not added back in. The most important example is the "Event Attendance" mod.:crybaby2:
My reasoning for this is reasonably simple. Even though changes made by us will be harder and take longer to make. But overall the system will be easier to maintain and faster to upgrade. The update from 3.6.1 to 3.6.7 took about 120 man hours. The upgrade from 3.6.8 took 2:icon_thum
Monty, I suspect, you probably have been following some of the internal changes, I made. But I haven't heard much about what you thought. Any comments? Monty or others.
The real changes are invisible except to those who care about HOW mods are added to the system. What I basically did, was return the site to virgin software and re-added our changes using some of the newer tools provided by vbulletin. There are no longer ANY code changes to vbulletin's code and only ONE? template is now modified. All other "effective" visual changes have been done using vbulletin "Hooks" to modfiy the necessary templates on the fly. If you look at the templates list, all templates, except "Postbit_Legacy" appear to be the original. Postbit_legacy ended up being too complicated to change on the fly, so we are using a greatly modified one. There are other templates that appear to be modified, but they are ones that are under our control or are used to make the on the fly changes.
So the new SOP will be not to apply any mods to the system that require manual code or template changes to vbulletin base code. That is why some changes were not added back in. The most important example is the "Event Attendance" mod.:crybaby2:
My reasoning for this is reasonably simple. Even though changes made by us will be harder and take longer to make. But overall the system will be easier to maintain and faster to upgrade. The update from 3.6.1 to 3.6.7 took about 120 man hours. The upgrade from 3.6.8 took 2:icon_thum
Monty, I suspect, you probably have been following some of the internal changes, I made. But I haven't heard much about what you thought. Any comments? Monty or others.
