Greetings,
I'd like to thank Mike for stepping in and posting the status from the board meeting. I've been heads down trying to figure out this problem for the past two weeks.
Let me explain what's going on.
We need to update the site. The existing site is running a combination of vBulletin 4 and PhotoPost (our image gallery). vBulletin 4 is an older version and has latent security issues which while they've not hit us yet, it is probably a matter of time.
The PhotoPost people have gone out of business (and the support even when they were around was iffy). In addition, the people hosting our site have "upgraded" things that make some of this old software (notably the gallery) not work as well as it used to.
Fortunately, there is a well respected replacement called XenForo. It includes an "media gallery" product. They've just come out with version 2.1 of their software and I've been doing the various things that we need (displaying our ad banners, handline the upcoming raffle, etc).
I thought I'd had the test site up last week, but I came to the realization that there is not currently an upgrade path from PhotoPost to XenForo 2.1 direcltly. You have to go to XenForo 1.5 and then upgrade that to 2.1. This is all well and good except the upgrade takes almost a day of runtime even if it all goes uninterrupted (which of course it didn't). Did you know that we have over 33 Gigabytes of imagery in our galleries?
Well, I finally finished a test site (more on that later). My intent is to leave this up for a few days for test and then if nobody finds any glaring errors, we'll set the existing vB site to READ ONLY mode (just incase there was some content that m issed being transferred) and the new XenForo site will become the new www.ncwoodworker.net. Note that both the new and old sites will be in read only mode for the day or so it takes to transfer from one to the other. Watch here for further announcements of site availalbilty.
What remains to be done (and is not quite as urgent as the rest) is moving over our article system (I only imported the forum posts and the gallery), the chat, and finishing up a few other special NCWW hacks (the DQ system ,etc..).
WHAT YOU CAN DO:
You can try out the new site and let me know if you see any real problems with it. You can PM flyingron on either site or email me at web.master@ncwoodworker.net.
This site has all the content from the existing site as of a few days ago and your username and password from here should get you in there. I do know that there were a few files dropped in the gallery transfer (notably the two open house pictures), that will be resolved on the real upgrade.
Note, that no content you create or upload on the test site will remain after the REAL XenForo site is released so keep a copy of anything important.
Oh, yes, the test site is https://test.ncwoodworker.net
I'd like to thank Mike for stepping in and posting the status from the board meeting. I've been heads down trying to figure out this problem for the past two weeks.
Let me explain what's going on.
We need to update the site. The existing site is running a combination of vBulletin 4 and PhotoPost (our image gallery). vBulletin 4 is an older version and has latent security issues which while they've not hit us yet, it is probably a matter of time.
The PhotoPost people have gone out of business (and the support even when they were around was iffy). In addition, the people hosting our site have "upgraded" things that make some of this old software (notably the gallery) not work as well as it used to.
Fortunately, there is a well respected replacement called XenForo. It includes an "media gallery" product. They've just come out with version 2.1 of their software and I've been doing the various things that we need (displaying our ad banners, handline the upcoming raffle, etc).
I thought I'd had the test site up last week, but I came to the realization that there is not currently an upgrade path from PhotoPost to XenForo 2.1 direcltly. You have to go to XenForo 1.5 and then upgrade that to 2.1. This is all well and good except the upgrade takes almost a day of runtime even if it all goes uninterrupted (which of course it didn't). Did you know that we have over 33 Gigabytes of imagery in our galleries?
Well, I finally finished a test site (more on that later). My intent is to leave this up for a few days for test and then if nobody finds any glaring errors, we'll set the existing vB site to READ ONLY mode (just incase there was some content that m issed being transferred) and the new XenForo site will become the new www.ncwoodworker.net. Note that both the new and old sites will be in read only mode for the day or so it takes to transfer from one to the other. Watch here for further announcements of site availalbilty.
What remains to be done (and is not quite as urgent as the rest) is moving over our article system (I only imported the forum posts and the gallery), the chat, and finishing up a few other special NCWW hacks (the DQ system ,etc..).
WHAT YOU CAN DO:
You can try out the new site and let me know if you see any real problems with it. You can PM flyingron on either site or email me at web.master@ncwoodworker.net.
This site has all the content from the existing site as of a few days ago and your username and password from here should get you in there. I do know that there were a few files dropped in the gallery transfer (notably the two open house pictures), that will be resolved on the real upgrade.
Note, that no content you create or upload on the test site will remain after the REAL XenForo site is released so keep a copy of anything important.
Oh, yes, the test site is https://test.ncwoodworker.net