We are planning a total reconstruction of the website and forum

[beltguy]

Subtitled: Our Website and Forum structure is a quagmire

Tuesday 4/30/2024

My apologies for the problems that we have had the past few days.

If you think the forum has a problem, please text me at: 303-four seven eight-3501,

None of our information is at risk, but both the website and forum file structures need to be completely reorganized and updated.  More in a later post.

Jim

[beltguy]

A bit of background here.  We started this forum in October of 2008.  Since that time there have been several software updates and many modifications to our file structure.  The same is true of the website.  In that same time frame GoDaddy in particular, and the industry in general, has updated their platforms many times.  The industry updates have been dictated by server technology evolution, dealing with malicious spam bots and hackers.  You all see this with all the Windows and cell phone updates (many of these updates occur on an almost weekly basis).

All of these updates make our internet safer and, for the most part, easier to use.  But they create havoc for those of us who administer/maintain websites and forums.  Couple that with my less than stellar skills and the results are that our file structure looks like "Fibber Mcgee's closet".  I have been able to keep our sites running with not too many problems -- until this past week.  In total we were down for three different reasons.  These were partly a case of bumping up against the latest GoDaddy/industry updates.

Both our website (WordPress platform) and forum (phpbb platform) are considered to be current, but there are significant updates to both platforms that need to be performed.  However, our biggest problem is that our PHP (the software that connects our website and forum platforms to the databases that contain all of our data) version needs to be updated, but there are issues that do not allow the update until the other platforms are updated.  Bottom line, we need to start over with a clean sheet.

In the next post I will describe my plans for the project.

Again, I want to emphasize that none of our fantastic, huge amount of data is at risk.

Jim

[beltguy]

In late June, I will have back surgery and the recovery is very restrictive and long.  For 6 weeks, I will not be able to do much in the shop {OH NO!!!}.

I plan on using that time to totally reconstruct our website and forum.  As a reader you will not see much, if any, change in appearance.  And, as I have mentioned before, all of our data is in a database format and will not be affected by the "rebirth" of our site/forum.

I will build and test the new sites on my personal hosted account on GoDaddy so that there will be minimal interruption to our online sites. 

I have used the term "sites" (plural) since, currently, the website is on eaglesinternational.net and the forum is on eagles-international.net.  There was a reason to split them up many years ago, but the rebuild will only be on eaglesinternational.net.  The eagles-international.net site will simply have a page that points to the new location.

Well, that is my plan.  We will see if it works out.

As a side note, the organization of our personal websites on GoDaddy is even more screwed up and I will also be working on that during by "recovery" period.

Jim

[rusty]

Thank you Jim for all you do and big salary that comes with it. ( big grin ) Good luck with your surgery  keep us posted
Wayne

[beltguy]

I changed the title of this thread so that folks don't think we are going to go into a full blown crash.

Simply said, over the past 15 plus years, our file structure of both the website and forum has become very cluttered.  This, together with some other "challenges", drives the need to totally reconstruct our sites.  As noted earlier, I will devote all of the resources needed during my surgery recovery period.  In the mean time,  I have started a test site on my private GoDaddy hosted account and have been doing a bit of research on the process as time permits

All of the pages and forum threads are contained in databases and none of those will be affected.

Jim

[goldeneagle]

Thanks for all you do Jim. Sounds like a lot of work to me.
Marty

[beltguy]

5/11/2024 Down again.

Well, we got taken down for using too much disc storage!  Our hosting account is  "Web Hosting Ultimate".  We upgraded a few years ago because of some issues and I was told we had what I pictured as unlimited storage - not the case.

We went over our limit because I have been making some backups in anticipation of our reconstruction.  Those backups are huge files and that put us over the edge.  GoDaddy gave me a 24 hour "get out of jail" to delete some of what I earlier call the quagmire. 

More fun.

Jim