Eagles International Forum

Well, we have made a little progress.

I converted our website theme to one based on a standardized WordPress theme. Recall, the theme is what gives the look and feel to a WP website. Our previous theme was a one off custom generated theme that would not allow us to update to more current versions of WP.

If you are at all familiar with the look and feel of the old website, you will see a few differences but most will never know that the website has been updated.

The new theme should allow us to easily upgrade to the 5.x.x version of WP when it fits in with the overall upgrade. We are currently on version 4.9.9 which WP considers to be current for the older version. WP 5.x.x is a totally different platform and has caused many problems when older websites tried to upgrade.

We still have a bit of an issue with the level of the database platform (not a big deal). However, we are reluctant to upgrade the database as it could impact the forum.

James continues to work on the forum upgrade and overall organization of the huge number of files on the hosting site. The effort on that part of the project is slow because the limited resources James can devote to the project.

As I have said so many times, both the website and forum are fully functional and are available for your enjoyment.

Jim

Hi All

James and I have made the decision that I will work with GoDaddy on Monday 11/22/2021 and have them load the most recent version of our forum software (recall that we are using a very outdated version).

All of the research we have done suggests that that will result in a very generic look to our forum - in other words, the look and feel of the forum will change - perhaps drastically.

If everything functions properly, James will then pick away at customizing the look of the forum so that it has more of our classic look.

All of the threads and posts are contained in databases and none of that information is at risk.

This is a major conversion and, typically, there are hiccups in the process. By working directly with GoDaddy, they can roll us back to our present software level if things really go south.

Wish us well

Jim

After the software upgrade, I believe the temporary appearance of the forum will look like this:
As time permits, we will modify the appearance to more closely replicate the current forum appearance.

Jim

In the process of working on the software upgrade, I have had some pretty significant panic moments and have managed to take the forum down a couple of times. In addition, a few posts made during the update have been lost, including one or two of my posts here.

For a while we lost all links to images within posts. I now have that back.

All of my work now will be concentrated on the clone version of our forum, so hopefully we will not have any major issues

Jim

Jim,
I'll wait until the dust settles on the revamping to resend posts, you have enough to do. I just hope Mason got to see everything before they disappeared. If there is a way, you probably should shut off the ability to post while things are being worked on.

good idea walter, ill just stand back for a bit

Probably the safe approach is to hold off. That said, I am working on the update using the clone in what the computer folks call a "sandbox", so hopefully I will not crash this site again.

For anyone wondering why we are trying to do the update, our legacy system is several versions old and the PHP that drives it is old as well. While the forum works OK ( until I screw up ) there are lots of things in the background that are pretty venerable and as I administer the forum I am finding lots of little anomalies that are popping up more frequently.

The subject of lost posts has come up. All posts are contained in a database and updating has not impacted any posts prior to my failed attempt last week. We have backed up the database for this process and try to back it up off-line periodically

We did lose one tread and a couple of posts in this tread from last week's debacle.

I did discover that all of the images in the posts are in a file folder rather than a database - much to my amazement. We will be backing up that file folder periodically (a two hour process).

Thanks for hanging in there during this process.

Jim