Downtime and Upgrades

[Mycal]

Things have been very slow since the turn of the new year. Work picked up for me and I have been pretty worn out. Things have gotten better and I've started progress on things again. I've been looking at where we stand right now and decided to update a few things.

Our hosting expires in 60 days. I've been with Bluehost for about 3-4 years now. They've been good for simple hosting, but it's time we moved on. I am going to slowly begin moving over this and all other sites I own over to a Linode VPS. This will give me more control over the entire site as well as run custom software without having to schedule a cron job to keep it up. I am going to start with the Odyssey site and end with this site and the forums. During this time, there will be downtime on both. If any site suddenly stops responding, ignore it and try again later.

Secondly, during this time, I am also refreshing our websites. I have been evaluating different PHP frameworks and settled on Laravel. It's fairly powerful and eases development of websites in nearly every aspect. Wordpress is nice for a simple blog, but what I have planned requires a lot of extra development. Steven, I'll have to get with you and give you the new access info as well as chat about what to do with the main site.

This weekend and next, I'm mainly going to be setting everything up. If it doesn't take long, and I assume it shouldn't, I'll begin moving over ody.

Also, I've had to cut down time spent on projects to weekends only right now. This is unfortunate, but I simply don't have the time during the week right now. I've fallen behind on my projected timelime again due to this, but I don't think it's too far behind. Still no public dates.

 

[Mycal]

Well this was rather painless. Move completed. One thing you'll likely notice is that this site is now much faster. I've not refreshed any pages yet (minus fixing broken things on odyonline.com), but it's coming.

Next step is to get our staging site up and running for an intermediary between my development site at home and this production site. Then get our private repository setup in its new home.

As of the time of this writing though, all sites have been moved over. Domains are still propagating changes so some have updated while others still point to the old host. To prevent inconsistency, I've disabled the main burningstormstudios.com domain. If you visit it right now, you will find a generic message telling you to come here. When the nameservers are updated, it will automatically look as it did before.

 

[steven]

It's a lot faster, which package did you use?

The Laravel thing seems like a good idea, I always just stuck close to Wordpress to avoid learning something new, doesn't seem like it will be too hard to get used to though.

 

[Mycal]

We are on a Linode 512MB package. It seemed sufficient for our needs and so far, that's been true.

I've been researching on what to do about the main page. I would like to keep Wordpress since it greatly simplifies the actual news/blogging aspect of the site. But my ultimate goal is to have a unified login across the main site, forum, odyonline.com and any and all games. This way, we are not requiring a user to register in many different places. I think the best solution, so we don't have to waste time redesigning the admin panel, is to use wordpress in the background to manage news/blogs, and access the data with a laravel wordpress API. That, or go back to pulling news from the forums directly and still use laravel to do so.

I'll still want to swap the authentication in wordpress to use the unified user database though, same as I plan to do with the forum, which is going to be a royal pain.

 

[steven]

Personally, the only reason I could see sticking with Wordpress is the simplicity of widgets/plugins/how easy it is to theme. I think it would be much easier to keep up with the news(actually updating it) if it pulled from the forums like it used to...and if we ever do get to the point where we want to have a more blog like presence we can always start using it. I have messed with plennnnnnty of user bridges from Wordpress to a few different forums and it's a huge pain in the ass but if you are going to self build and do it right it will be awesome in the long run. Sounds like a really good direction though.