While not much has been visible to you, there has been a fair amount of progress toward upgrading and rebranding the site. Here's what has been completed so far.
This week we'll be testing the upgrade process we've defined to determine timing for all the technical steps and put a timeline in place as well as identifying any issues that will need to be addressed during the upgrade. Once the timeline has been determined, I'll post it here in a followup. I also plan to post weekly progress reports.
Geek stuff for those of you that care.
- Progress started with recovery of the articles that were inaccessible after the server move.
- The downtime last weekend let us get a copy of the server and database and get our development server up and running.
- Confirmed that there was no loss of data in the development server build.
- We've tested multiple upgrade versions and processes, some successful and some not so much.
- This weekend an upgrade plan was put together to get us on to a modern, and more importantly, still supported version of the vBulletin software.
This week we'll be testing the upgrade process we've defined to determine timing for all the technical steps and put a timeline in place as well as identifying any issues that will need to be addressed during the upgrade. Once the timeline has been determined, I'll post it here in a followup. I also plan to post weekly progress reports.
Geek stuff for those of you that care.
- The site today uses a number of third party programs to overcome deficiencies in the older versions of vBulletin.
- We are currently on version 3.8.7
- The only third party program that continues to function in vBulletin 5 and higher is Tapatalk.
- vBulletin 5 requires an OS upgrade to run on our server and our current version won't run on the upgraded OS. We are planning to upgrade to the 4.x series of vBulletin specifically 4.2.2 path level 4 which is still supported and also supports the add on programs we have today and will run on our OS without an upgrade.
- We will also be upgrading to the last version of vbAdvanced. Since vBulletin 5 has nearly everything built in that was in this add on, the developer no longer offers the product.
- A direct upgrade to vBulletin 5.x is not an option in part because of the OS upgrade issue, but in the change from version 4 to 5, the introduced new syles, page design structures, templates, etc. that essentially means that everything other than content in the forums needs to be rebuilt from scratch.
- Next steps are to upgrade the OS and then upgrade to version 5.x of bulletin with the necessary site rebuild.
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