We’re now running on WordPress, which is at least the sixth content management system (CMS) we’ve used over the years, but only the second commercial one (We had a brief and disastrous honeymoon with E107 in 2003). So, why’d we stop using our custom system? Mostly because of usability: it’s easier for our authors to write in WordPress. WordPress has a lot of features that we’d never had time to add on our own, and it offers a great framework for adding features of our own.
Case in point: our WordPress install is tightly integrated with our vBulletin forums; probably moreso than any other WordPress/vBulletin combo out there. We found a great WordPress plugin to integrate the two products, and then improved it to offer even more integration. To my knowledge, we’re the only WordPress/vBulletin site on which you can seamlessly comment on either the article or the forum thread and have the conversations merged. Our authors’ information and settings automatically updates from their vBulletin profiles rather than needing to maintain separate accounts. As we move along, expect to see avatars in the article comments and more integration. We’ve been preparing for this transition for two months, but it’s never enough time to do everything you want.
I’m particularly happy with the upgrade because we didn’t break any news or article URLs in the process (including multiple pages); every article is exactly where it was before. In fact, old URLs from Short-Media articles (that’s 2 CMSs ago) should STILL continue to redirect to the right place. Not only that, but this upgrade actually added “new” content: the 2004–2005 Short-Media news archive that went offline with our last platform change is back once more, including images and tags. Speaking of tags, we imported the entire tagging structure into WordPress, and it’s much more flexible now, so hopefully we can have some fun with that. There’s also a review category once again to narrow things down when you’re just tooking for products.
Of course, this wasn’t just a CMS change, it was a design change (our 11th, it turns out). Jared, Greg (fatcat), Rob (Thrax), Matt (Nomad), and other staff members went on a digital retreat and created the essence of what is our new layout and look. Cheers for that! Also, thanks to Peter (Buddy J) for his serendipitous exclamation “We’re on it”, which is now our tagline. And, thanks to Portzebie, of TF2 fame, who created the cartoon version of our logo that appears as a watermark behind Hot Threads on the forum. Expect to see him popping up more over time (and soon).
Then the forum had to change to match. As usual, we have both light (default) and dark themes. There’s a lack of polish for most of the buttons in the dark theme; an unintended consequence of how I made them. That’ll be fixed soon. I ran out of time for forum hacking. More important are the hacks I did accomplish, which I hope will improve usability. I completely overhauled the navigation bar to include (only) the links that people actually use, and I streamlined the Control Panel to be easier to navigate and read. In keeping with the overall design, you’ll notice a lot less “grid” in the forums. Also, the Hot Threads, Latest News, and Icrontic Byte now appear at the top of forums and threads in addition to the index page. I did this to encourage further perusing by our many guests, so I hope that works out.
Lastly, Archive.org is a very cool thing. Courtesy of that site and the Warrick recovery tool, I present the August 8, 2000 original article by Mortin that kicked off Apu’s Hardware (the precursor to Icrontic), which was imported to the new system as the first post. Then, you can slog through the 8,700 posts that follow it. Better get started now.
OK, seriously… no more CMS or design changes for a while. This one needs to last for at least a year.
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