Pardon Our Dust

As we mentioned in the opening article, we’re not 100% done.

The building analogy is very apropos – we are more than done enough to open – but we still have more to do. We have brought over an amazing amount of data (see the Overview article for more details).

But we still have a few things to do. I’ll divide those into three groups. The first group is the little things we have to get done to put the finishing touches on the new site. These will all get addressed in the next week or so. They include:

• Profile Items
  • Birthdays are now as done as they are going to be – since it was free form text and optional we got more than 1/2 and less then 2/3 converted with some hand SQL tweaking
    • We missed that the birthdays didn’t convert properly
      • We’ll bring over just the birthdays in the next few days again
      • There’s no easy way to tell if you edited it – so sorry if we clobber any corrections
      • One not is you can choose whether to share your birthday or just your age
      • Birthdays are never visible to non-members
  • The storage for the “Ratings” is very different – that is a more manual conversion process that we just ran out of time
    • If you leave them alone we’ll bring over the ratings in the next few days
    • If you edit them yourselves we’ll leave what you edited in place
• Calendar
  • The Calendar format is particularly hard to convert
  • We will bring over the basic items but some information will be lost
  • We currently have a permission problem where people aren’t being allowed to post Events
  • This is a known issue that we’ll try to resolve ASAP
• Chat Box (Shoutbox replacement)
  • The good news is the new chat box is much more lively than the old shout box
  • The trick is it’s a lot more work to add it into every page like the old side
  • We’ll get there – but for now it’s at the top of the forums page and always available from the top level Nav Bar

The next group are things that will take weeks and months of volunteer ad-hoc work.

• FAQ Entries
  • Through hard, manual work the non-technical FAQ entries are mostly migrated
  • The technical FAQ entries will get migrated in a very rough form automatically this week
  • They will require a lot of work to clean up for the new site
• Reviews
  • Similar to FAQs – requires custom import and there are only about 40 so a lower priority
• Maintenance and Other Articles
  • All of the articles from the old site are under an “Articles from Old Site” tree
  • This is not because they are old or obsolete – but they need manual cleanup and reformatting to look and work their best. As each article gets cleaned up it will get “moved up” back into the main tree
  • VOLUNTEERS NEEDED
    • You don’t need to be too technical – if you can do basic word processing you can do it – the new site software makes it much easier – please contact Mark Gooderum via the Contact page or Private Message
    • There are about 600 articles from the old site to be cleaned up – some easy, some more work
    • There’s another serveral 100 FAQ entries

Last are new features. This is much more open ended. Probably the 1st item is a new members map and some form of geographic searching. The new members list is already much more searchable than the old site.

The other area is whether to move a lot of the technical content from the FAQs and Articles to a Wiki. That is something we’re still looking at now and will have an answer soon. The new site CMS may be good enough or even better for searching – we can “tag” articles with arbitrary categories like “engine” or “Sundowner”.

So there you are…