Hi all,
I have been suggesting this has been on the radar for a while and in fact it has been. I have been planning updates to the site for 2 years now and both years something has come up that has prevented me from completing the changes in time for the start of the season, I am loathe to do major updates during the season as well.
So last year I started writing a whole new system for the site based entirely off of the forums, I came up against some very hard times towards the end of last year and almost gave up on the site and everything completely. I am happy to say that I am on the other side of those issues now and looking towards the future for the site.
Now whilst the code I was writing was pretty solid it fell short in a few areas, its still going to be my focus to move us to a more forum centric site however I am going to do this in smaller increments and rely on the work of others that is moving forward slowly.
The first step I have decided is that I want to bring the tipping comp away from Joomla and the front-end and tie it into the forums instead. This is both a good and bad move, simply because the forums software we are using is up for big changes within the next few years, and this means I am going to have to do some re-coding down the track, but such is life.
The benefit of doing this is that we will not have a lot of login issues we have seen in the past.
After that part of the coding is complete, I am going to be looking at moving all of our content over to something that is essentially driven by the forums.
Overall you won't notice a lot of changes but there is a hell of a lot going on in the back ground. Once I have completed all of this I will be removing or archiving our old site and moving us to a new fresh install, with the old content, there will be a few cosmetic changes that go a long with this.
Overall we should see some performance improvements and I have already implemented some server side caching with XCache which over the next few days should see the site speed up more and more.
Once I have moved everything into the new system we should have fewer overheads on the server and I can complete some finer optimisations which should see us runnings faster and lighter than ever.
I will try to make this all as pain free as possible and hopefully there should be very little impact on you all, I will aim to make most of the changes during bye rounds or other times that permit, though some minor down time is unavoidable.
I know for most of you this is a whole lot of jargon but I like to keep you all up to date. As always I value your feedback and suggestions and assistance. So here is what I need from you.
What features would you like to see added to the tipping comp?
What features would you like to see in the content areas of the site?
Dan
I have been suggesting this has been on the radar for a while and in fact it has been. I have been planning updates to the site for 2 years now and both years something has come up that has prevented me from completing the changes in time for the start of the season, I am loathe to do major updates during the season as well.
So last year I started writing a whole new system for the site based entirely off of the forums, I came up against some very hard times towards the end of last year and almost gave up on the site and everything completely. I am happy to say that I am on the other side of those issues now and looking towards the future for the site.
Now whilst the code I was writing was pretty solid it fell short in a few areas, its still going to be my focus to move us to a more forum centric site however I am going to do this in smaller increments and rely on the work of others that is moving forward slowly.
The first step I have decided is that I want to bring the tipping comp away from Joomla and the front-end and tie it into the forums instead. This is both a good and bad move, simply because the forums software we are using is up for big changes within the next few years, and this means I am going to have to do some re-coding down the track, but such is life.
The benefit of doing this is that we will not have a lot of login issues we have seen in the past.
After that part of the coding is complete, I am going to be looking at moving all of our content over to something that is essentially driven by the forums.
Overall you won't notice a lot of changes but there is a hell of a lot going on in the back ground. Once I have completed all of this I will be removing or archiving our old site and moving us to a new fresh install, with the old content, there will be a few cosmetic changes that go a long with this.
Overall we should see some performance improvements and I have already implemented some server side caching with XCache which over the next few days should see the site speed up more and more.
Once I have moved everything into the new system we should have fewer overheads on the server and I can complete some finer optimisations which should see us runnings faster and lighter than ever.
I will try to make this all as pain free as possible and hopefully there should be very little impact on you all, I will aim to make most of the changes during bye rounds or other times that permit, though some minor down time is unavoidable.
I know for most of you this is a whole lot of jargon but I like to keep you all up to date. As always I value your feedback and suggestions and assistance. So here is what I need from you.
What features would you like to see added to the tipping comp?
What features would you like to see in the content areas of the site?
Dan