All,
The time has finally come that the software upgrade and reskinning of the site becomes reality. The upgrade itself will begin at 8:00 a.m. Central Time Saturday April 25th and should take about three to four hours.
Things you will notice immediately after the upgrade once the site is back on line.
Performance - For the first few hours after the upgrade, you may notice sluggish performance. vBulletin needs to rebuild the site indices and that just plain takes time.
Domain - The domain the site is hosted on is still BT3Central.com. There are still some hard links to that domain in the database that need to be cleaned up before that can be switched over. There is no ETA for this yet.
Quick Reply - Quick reply is now threaded. There is a button on the bottom right corner of every post where you can quick reply.
FAQ - There is quite a bit of new content in the site FAQ. vBulletin has provided new content on using the features of the software. Not all the features will be active immediately. You can read the FAQ or randomly click stuff and see what happens. Use the method with which you're more comfortable.
User CP - Click on "Settings" in the header bar. This was not added as an item on the navigation bar as the settings link is available in the header of every page on the site.
User Profile - Click on either "my profile" or your username in the header bar. This also was not added as an item on the navigation bar as both of these settings are available in the header of every screen on the site.
Chat - There will be no chat feature following the upgrade. The vote was over 75% to sunset it at the upgrade.
Post Upgrade work in order of priority
The following are things that are scheduled for the very near future, but were simply too much work to accomplish during the upgrade without extended downtime.
Tapatalk - This should be reactivated no later than Tuesday night and probably much sooner. There isn't a way to activate this on the test site without deactivating on the live site and a new version is required to go with the upgraded software.
Galleries - If you had images in galleries previously, you won't be able to see them for about a week. The conversion process for them is labor intensive and rather than keep the site down for days while this work is being done, we will perform this work over the week following the upgrade. When this conversion work is complete, you will see your old gallery images in an album. Your albums can be accessed by clicking on your user id or "My Profile" in the top right corner of the page header and locating "Albums" which will be on the left side column of you profile page. The old galleries will be converted to albums entitled "Converted Galleries" or something very similar.
Articles - Oh no, not again! The articles and their content are still safe and sound in the forums where they were but have been converted to simple forums. The software that drove the articles section previously is a third party extension to vBulletin that has no upgrade. These will be converted into the format for the vBulletin CMS or content management system. Thankfully, vBulletin provides a conversion process for these, but the CMS system needs to be configured first. The article conversion is also too labor intensive to be done during downtime. This conversion should occur over the next couple of months at which time you will see a new articles item in the menu bar.
The newer software has other features that we will work on bringing on line after all items above are completed.
The time has finally come that the software upgrade and reskinning of the site becomes reality. The upgrade itself will begin at 8:00 a.m. Central Time Saturday April 25th and should take about three to four hours.
Things you will notice immediately after the upgrade once the site is back on line.
Performance - For the first few hours after the upgrade, you may notice sluggish performance. vBulletin needs to rebuild the site indices and that just plain takes time.
Domain - The domain the site is hosted on is still BT3Central.com. There are still some hard links to that domain in the database that need to be cleaned up before that can be switched over. There is no ETA for this yet.
Quick Reply - Quick reply is now threaded. There is a button on the bottom right corner of every post where you can quick reply.
FAQ - There is quite a bit of new content in the site FAQ. vBulletin has provided new content on using the features of the software. Not all the features will be active immediately. You can read the FAQ or randomly click stuff and see what happens. Use the method with which you're more comfortable.
User CP - Click on "Settings" in the header bar. This was not added as an item on the navigation bar as the settings link is available in the header of every page on the site.
User Profile - Click on either "my profile" or your username in the header bar. This also was not added as an item on the navigation bar as both of these settings are available in the header of every screen on the site.
Chat - There will be no chat feature following the upgrade. The vote was over 75% to sunset it at the upgrade.
Post Upgrade work in order of priority
The following are things that are scheduled for the very near future, but were simply too much work to accomplish during the upgrade without extended downtime.
Tapatalk - This should be reactivated no later than Tuesday night and probably much sooner. There isn't a way to activate this on the test site without deactivating on the live site and a new version is required to go with the upgraded software.
Galleries - If you had images in galleries previously, you won't be able to see them for about a week. The conversion process for them is labor intensive and rather than keep the site down for days while this work is being done, we will perform this work over the week following the upgrade. When this conversion work is complete, you will see your old gallery images in an album. Your albums can be accessed by clicking on your user id or "My Profile" in the top right corner of the page header and locating "Albums" which will be on the left side column of you profile page. The old galleries will be converted to albums entitled "Converted Galleries" or something very similar.
Articles - Oh no, not again! The articles and their content are still safe and sound in the forums where they were but have been converted to simple forums. The software that drove the articles section previously is a third party extension to vBulletin that has no upgrade. These will be converted into the format for the vBulletin CMS or content management system. Thankfully, vBulletin provides a conversion process for these, but the CMS system needs to be configured first. The article conversion is also too labor intensive to be done during downtime. This conversion should occur over the next couple of months at which time you will see a new articles item in the menu bar.
The newer software has other features that we will work on bringing on line after all items above are completed.
Comment