While sitting on my butt at home (after another surgery) I’ve been converting my BimmerMania.com website from phpBB 2.0.23 to phpBB 3.x. The actual forum was fairly straight forward and simple to convert! That took about 15-20 minutes before that part was complete. That is counting the time that I wasted searching for guides, tips and tricks on the conversion so I wouldn’t piss off any members of the site by messing up anything.
Well, I made the new design live and the board is enabled! I’m still tweaking several pages, but I decided to make go a head and make it live simply because the boards are pretty active and I didn’t want to manually copy new posts from the old forum which was live (phpBB2) to the new one (phpBB3). That would have been too much work! Oh and copying over new members and matching their posts.
The conversion is simple, but it’s a one time deal, you can’t sync several times to update posts and members as far as I know. If I could have just synchronized all of the posts and members later then I would have completed the entire conversion behind the scenes and released it all at once. Oh well.
Anyhoo, the fun and long part of the conversion if two fold:
Recreating all of the custom pages, such as the downloads section, takes some time to perfect. I have a good habit of trying to validate all of my pages (the entire site), so it takes a bit longer per page than just making the content show up. (Btw: WordPress has a nasty habit of mixing lists and <p>’s like crazy. I’m still trying to work out some of those validation errors. Can’t blame anyone but myself..and the javascript back-end to the visual editor, lol.)
Tweaking the theme to look awesome, clean, slick, relevant -> Zen. This is one of the most important aspects of web design in order to get a crowd to use the site. I mean, who wants to use a website that looks like it was designed back in the text only days of the world wide web? Even if it worked perfect and never made or caused any mistakes..the interface has to be appealing!
Well, I’m now about half way done recreating the downloads section of the site. The only remaining portions after this are the contact page (it’s there, but none functional at the moment) and a garage. There are apparently no garages made as of yet for phpBB 3.x, so it looks like I may need to port the car garage that I used in phpBB 2.x over. This could take some time.
Oh well, back to work!
UPDATE (2008-05-23):
Well, BimmerMania.com is pretty much completely converted to phpBB 3.0.1! I’ve held off on a couple of items in my to-do list until I have time to get around to them. They aren’t show-stoppers, so the site is fine without them (just two fairly small tweaks).
The phpBB Garage for phpBB 3.x is coming kind of slow. I’d prefer to use a Garage that’s already been developed, but hey..what are you gonna do when there’s nothing out there already!? If anyone comes across a garage mod then please let me know!
Well, I think you’ll all find this useful at one point or another. I’ve implemented editing for user comments, finally. I’ve been meaning to do this for a while and correcting some errors here and there, but now you can correct your own or add more to your comment. However, there are just a few things you will need to know:
You will not have the option to edit your comment unless your ip address is the same one that was used when you posted the comment. It is best to edit the comment soon after originally posting it since ip addresses do change frequently for some.
You cannot edit your comment after a specific time period from originally posting it. I will use a 48 hour interval to start out with. This interval may change, but I’ll keep you up to date.
Off to finish F.R.I.E.N.D.S. on TBS!
UPDATE:
Quoting is also an option now! Both of these features rely on javascript and will be improved greatly in the near future. They are just kind of 1.0 versions I guess, or maybe alpha. Enjoy.
So you might be wondering what this post is all about with such a weird title. Basically, me being the little web developer that I am, I’m pushing myself to learn new standards and actually use these standards as I further my knowledge of web design. I mean this both in the visual sense as well as the behind the scenes or backbone coding sense.
I strive to apply standards to everything that I have on this site. It is actually evolving as I learn more and understand how to implement some of the standards that I’ve learned. I know by now you’re wondering what this has to do with No-WWW and kyleabaker.com, so I’ll break it down for you..
I just recently (as in today) did some server side work to force a domain redirect from www.kyleabaker.com to kyleabaker.com. This is in theory how most all websites should handle the www sub-domain. The reason being that it is redundant for most all websites. For example, with my website I have no other sub-domains served to the public. When visiting or browsing this site you will never need to enter a sub-domain to navigate this site. Therefore the use of ‘www’ is understood. This is how the majority of public websites on the Internet are today. The exceptional websites would be sites such as yahoo, google, ms, etc…that actually take advantage of sub-domains such as ‘mail.blah.com’ or ’search.blah.com’. However, it is still understood that when visiting Google.com for instance that the ‘www’ can be left off. If you’ve ever seen websites do this in the past then it was probably because they had a crafty URI and wanted it to stand out by removing the ‘www’ automatically.
If you would like to learn more about No-WWW then visit their website at no-www.org. You can also test your site there to see what class level your site is in. The most common is Class A, but the small editing that I did moved mine to a Class B. Class A means that the site is accessible with and without the www, however, it does not redirect to the non-www URI (or from the non-www to the www for that matter). Class B means that the site does redirect to the non-www from the www sub-domain. Class C (which is very strict, but according to standards is how websites should be designed) means that visiting a site with ‘www’ at the beginning will get you a 404 file not found page, but non-www version will pull up the site perfectly find. If you want to see one of these sites in the exact opposite form then try visiting the following links (their implementation is the strict like Class C, however they have the allowed sub-domain and blocked sub-domain backwards.):
If you have any questions about this or any other standards (this one being supported less than most) then please do ask questions or feel free to look into their site and find a bit more information!
I’ve added a quick drop down box for the search field that uses AJAX and PHP on the backend to fetch results for you in real time. Just another piece of the site’s redesign that has been underway. Stay tuned for more news and updates!
I’ve been working on redesigning the site a bit so it doesn’t feel so cluttered. I’m not finished yet and still have a bit of cleaning up to do. However, I wanted to get some comments, feedback and constructive criticism. Please let me know the goods and the bads. If you can..please give a suggestion or 20.
I don’t want to officially launch the design yet, so I’m waiting for reviews. I’m curious if it’s better or worse and what is better or worse about it. I haven’t gone as far as setting up cookies or passing the css tag, so the style sheet will only apply on pages with css=2 appended to them. If you view another page and would like to see how it looks with the style sheet then just add ?css=2 at the end and press enter. Here are some links to get started..
(Btw: WordPress has a nasty habit of mixing lists and <p>’s like crazy. I’m still trying to work out some of those validation errors. 
Can’t blame anyone but myself..and the javascript back-end to the visual editor, lol.)
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So you might be wondering what this post is all about with such a weird title. Basically, me being the little web developer that I am, I’m pushing myself to learn new standards and actually use these standards as I further my knowledge of web design. I mean this both in the visual sense as well as the behind the scenes or backbone coding sense.
I’ve added a quick drop down box for the search field that uses