After testing by various intrepid volunteers (see Volunteer explorers wanted ) I have decided that this forum will be migrating to Discourse in the not too distant future. It looks different but it pretty much allows us to do everything we do today, plus has some other useful features. Discourse as a package is being actively developed/enhanced/patched and doesn’t have a forthcoming end-of-life issue (for PHP 8.1) that the current version of the existing forum software has.
I’m not ready to migrate just yet. There are a number of steps I have to complete before we can move. In particular:
- I need to decide which theme(s) and colour palette(s) to make available.
- I need to implement a method by which old links to the forum from external sites can still reach the correct place. I’ve started to develop that today.
- I need to get the final build server with data migrated in place ready for a final top-up migration before we switch over
I suspect that’s going to take me a couple of weeks at least, depending on how many other non-forum support things I need to do in addition to the migration.
As far as users are concerned…PMs will not be migrated. So if you have any that you really want/need to keep then please download them to your own system before the migration date (TBA). (2) above means that as soon as we finally migrate access to the old system will have to be disabled to allow the linking mechanism to work.
As soon as I know the migration date I’ll let you all know.
Thanks,
Chris
Just a quick update…
- I think I’ve completed the mods to the migration script. I’m running a full test at the moment to check this but I’m hoping it all works as planned.
- I’ve started looking at the theme/colour scheme. I’ve got some more work to do but that won’t take long hopefully
- The redirection script from SMF URLs to Discourse URLs is finished and seems to be working OK
So I’m in the final stages before starting the full migration. The migration will take a few days as there are some things I need to do on the new system before I can let you into it. For now, if you want copies of your PMs from this system then please grab a copy of them now.
If you have Personal Messages that you’d like to export before the software change you can find details here - http://discourse.weather-watch.com/p/566581
You’ll find two menu options now. One downloads ALL inbox PMs and the second downloads all SENT PMs. You need to use both options if you want to download INBOX and SENT messages.
The migration script is finished. It’s not 100% perfect but there are some malformed bits of SMF posts that cause problems.
For example, I found a quote that didn’t have the trailing /quote tag. SMF handled it because the quote was the full message so the quote tag was automatically closed at the end of the post. The translator is designed to handle properly matched sets of tags so doesn’t translate the quote at all. There are also nested tags that I can’t (easily) translate, e.g. use of a bold tag inside a colour tag inside a URL tag. Technically I think the script should translate these but I’m not sure if Discourse allows it.
Anyway, as I said these are few and far between so I’m going to live with a few anomalies in how a small number of historic posts look.
So now the migration starts for real. I’ll be taking a copy of the forum today and importing it into the ‘live’ Discourse system. I then have various settings to configure and changes to make. When I’m finished making those I’ll shut this forum down and do a final incremental migration before enabling the new Discourse forum. I’ll give some notice of when the final switchover will happen but these days many people don’t log in as regularly so even if I gave a few weeks notice not everyone will see it. Hopefully the ‘regulars’ will see the notification.
Just to be clear about the new forum…pretty much all the content from this forum will be in the new one and you’ll log in with your existing username/password. The URL is different but if you go to the old (this) URL then you’ll be re-directed to the new forum. It looks different but works in much the same way. The early testers have been using a test version of it for a few weeks and they’ve found it isn’t too difficult to use. Once the new forum is available I’ll publish a number of Hints & Tips messages to give you some ideas of new features that might be useful.