Forum upgrades 25th to 26th June 2016

[gabba]

Hi everyone

Thought I would put a post up with a bit more information about the forum upgrade over the weekend.

For a long time we've struggled to apply new features to the forum, along with patching of the core code. It meant that we were in a position where a security patch was released, and we couldn't apply that patch to the forum

The solution was to apply an upgrade to the site and patch it from there, which worked, but reset all the feature modules, which then needed re-installing. Unfortunately some of the feature modules we had didn't install on the new version, so we also took the opportunity to refresh those as well.

All up I'd estimate we probably impacted around 60-70% of the code base for the site, so yes we changed more than we left behind ;-)

So what do we get out of it?

Well we now have a forum that is upgraded to the latest version. As we've fixed up a significant amount of code, the error log for the site is probably the lowest we've seen since the forum was installed, and anecdotally the forum now performs faster than it did before the weekend. We've spent around $100 just getting some of the critical feature modules up to date, including the Gallery.

The updated feature modules not only mean the site is more secure, but bring a host of new and improved features. One of these are the updated Human readable / Search Engine Friendly URL's. This caused considerable pain over the weekend, to a point where we discovered we couldn't go back to our old SEF URL's. This means that some of the URL's you used in the past will have changed slightly, and if you try to use the old URL, you will end up at the homepage on the site!

Some of the URLs I will create redirects for, however too many redirects will slow down the site so I can't do all the old links. The solution is to use the Search feature on the site

That's about it for now - just wanted to let you know what we were up to. I'll post up more information about some of the new features later, but in the meantime if you have any questions, then let me know

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[PaulMy]

All seems good from this part of the globe.  Well done, and I am sure a few times ready to pull out a few hairs.

Regards,
Paul

[Wolfie33]

One minor issue I am experiencing, more of an annoyance than anything.

If I check out a post from the Recent Posts area,
neither the "new" orange indicator or the "new posts" icon on the main page updates.
If I go in from the main page, it does update.

I cleared my cache, in case it was a local thing, but the issue remains.

Cheers