Out of curiosity, how is it going?

Jim is progressing with this, but as he is also moving his time is stretched at present.

mhh,

that does not sound very promising

There go my campaign subscriptions Without the ability to upload pictures, no particiaption.

Bump

Curiosity, is it good or bad?

Hi Drab,
At this point I would have to say it's pretty bad. I did have some promising starting points in finding a user management engine to build off of. However making a complete content management system on top of that with all the bells and whistles of a modern site is more than a little daunting. Every time I sit down to work on it, it has literally been days or weeks since the prior time which is not really making it easy to progress rapidly. And in the past 2 months I can honestly say there had been little to no progress due to our upcoming move.

I don't imagine being able to really have something to show people until the fall... who am I kidding... WINTER at least.

That said I am still looking at integrating some of the new features and code that would be in the new site and potentially may try to work those in if feasible for short term fixes. The chat box for example on news and reviews pages. However I spent 4+ hours trying to fix that last week and really got no where. My ajax-style calls are just not working as before and my strengths have never been in Javascript (or error handling as well).

Fingers crossed!

Best wishes,
Jim

Hoi Jim,

I totally understand your "pain"; been there, done that, and went down in a ball of fire multiple times :-)

May I suggest a different line of thinking?... and working?

The users probably don't expect a completely different site in one big bang, maybe many users even hate the idea that the site they are so familiar with would drastically change overnight. I certainly have experienced "user revolution" with some drastic upgrades during my programming life

If I would be in a position to give some advice:

- I would certainly advise against using one or another half cooked CMS system. Instead, do it yourself, then at least you are sure that all bugs are your making :-) and strangely enough, this often does not cost much more time than getting familiar with a CMS system made by someone else.

- I would tackle the main shortcomings of the site with new code, from the bottom up, replacing outdated code using a service oriented approach. "Fixing" bugs in already outdated code costs a hell of a lot of time, and often leads only to new bugs. Incremental upgrades also allow balancing the time spent on programming.

Do you have an architectural drawing of the site? If not, making is step 1

have fun