Major Upgrade Planned

Today, I am announcing a plan to upgrade Tartarus.  We will have a major software upgrade that will make some of the current features unusable.

The changes will come as a response to the forum software that we use; bbPress which is being rewritten as a plugin to the blog/website software that we use; WordPress.  This change will make all our plugins and customisation to the forum rather useless.

However, I don’t intend to lose this data.  I intend to write or use existing WordPress plugins to meet what we have, but this will come later after I have satisfaction with the way the upgrade is working.

When will we upgrade?

bbPress 2.0 (the plugin to WordPress) will be released as stable at the end of June.  This is to match the release of WordPress 3.2.  I will not move Tartarus to this software stack until I am happy with its performance in testing.

Before I do upgrade this site to bbPress 2.0, I may upgrade it to bbPress 1.1.  Though I do not know the release date of 1.1, so I may skip it altogether.

What changes will happen?

This list is simply what I am anticipating.  Some of the items I can’t be sure about until the changes have been made to the live site.  But some of them I know are definitely going to change.

• Forum sub-domain change.
  • This is definitely going to happen because the forum will be inside WordPress, and it won’t be separate software that usually works best on its own domain access.
  • Redirection from http://forum.tartarus.co.nz will be put in place.
• Hopefully the damned 404-error that we often get on the large topics will go away.
• Theme will change.
• Plugins/features will be lost.  I expect this list to be lost, but I may get them back eventually:
  • Experience Points and badges
  • Extended Profile info
  • Tartarus Mobile + “via Tartarus Mobile”.
    • I will recreate this.
  • Topic icons, green text, mentions/replies, word filter, smilies.
• Tartarus Mobile.  This means will stop working on the current site until I create a version of bbPress Mobile that works with bbPress 2.0.  I intend to do this because I feel it is very useful.

There will definitely be others that I have forgotten to mention, but when I notice them I will state them.  Avatars will probably be kept considering that they’re already handled by a WordPress plugin.

From what I have read about the development of bbPress 2.0, there will be an importer of forums, topics, posts and users from bbPress 1.x.  This means that we should be able to keep all the content that we already have.  It will also means that we’ll still have the large threads to test whether the 404-error is less frequent or gone completely.

Benefits

I have touched on some of the technical benefits of upgrading to bbPress 2.0 above, and apart from being on new and up-to-date software, I know that some of the benefits are use-case scenarios.

By having bbPress 2.0, we’ll be able to integrate forum posts and topics within pages and blog posts.  We’ll be able to manage a system where users can do a bit more than just communicate on a forum.

When we planned the coup d’état to replace Tartarus: The Underworld with something new, we envisioned a new website that didn’t just replace Smile City’s forum while providing experience points and profile badges.  We envisioned a website that would have user-generated content.

We were hoping to create a system where users could write tutorials, reviews and other content.  We wanted a place where someone like Waireka or frup could offer GIMP tutorials.  Someone like StrikeFreedom could post game reviews and walk-throughs.  A site that was more than just a lightly moderated forum.

With the integration that bbPress 2.0 provides, I have hope that we might be able to achieve this.