Site upgrade to Joomla 3..3 - 25th december

hi all,

Today I've installed the last version of joomla 2.5 (v2.5.28) after today there will be no more updates for that version of joomla so with that in mind I have been working on upgrading the site to joomla 3.3 and after many months of testing and trials and errors I’ve not got it to the stage that I can make the changes to the site and upgrade it to j3.3.

I'm going to to the upgrade on he 25th of December 2014, normally the site normally goes very silent at that time of the year so it's not a major problem for the site.

What I will do is keep the site live but in total lock down, so people can read the posts and stories but make no new posts, once the new version is ready I’ll upload it and delete the existing site and bring the new version live, so the total true down time will only be a few minutes rather than a number of hours.

I've been looking at a skin for the site called meet gavick www.gavick.com/joomla-templates/meet-gavern,93.html if anyone knows of a great free skin for joomla 3.3 please let me know.

If you have any questions please post them here and I’ll answer them as soon as I can.

Fats

a quick update on a few things, I’m going to completely reinstall the server rather than just replace the site, this is to allow me to use faster software to improve the speed of the site, I’m not going to re-upload the image galleries as part of the site update, this is for me to make changes to the way the galleries are displayed and implemented (more on that to come later).

I'll post some screen-shots of the new site later on this week.

Fats

fats wrote: a quick update on a few things, I’m going to completely reinstall the server rather than just replace the site, this is to allow me to use faster software to improve the speed of the site, I’m not going to re-upload the image galleries as part of the site update, this is for me to make changes to the way the galleries are displayed and implemented (more on that to come later).

I'll post some screen-shots of the new site later on this week.

Fats

Two considerations about that:

1) since you're at it you might want to consider merging multiple galleries from the same author, I tried to clean them up a few months back, but some work remains to be done
2) how would this affect picture that are not in the galleries? Like those from the forum or embeded in the stories?

Woodclaw wrote:

fats wrote: a quick update on a few things, I’m going to completely reinstall the server rather than just replace the site, this is to allow me to use faster software to improve the speed of the site, I’m not going to re-upload the image galleries as part of the site update, this is for me to make changes to the way the galleries are displayed and implemented (more on that to come later).

I'll post some screen-shots of the new site later on this week.

Fats

Two considerations about that:

1) since you're at it you might want to consider merging multiple galleries from the same author, I tried to clean them up a few months back, but some work remains to be done
2) how would this affect picture that are not in the galleries? Like those from the forum or embedded in the stories?

the answers to the considerations are as follows

1. the galleries need rebuilding, one of the big issues is that we have site library image galleries with user upload, I never sorted them out in the way they needed, this time I’ll get it all sorted, it should take be about a week to do.

2. the forum images will be fine, the unsorted images need to be traced to see where they belong to, if needs be I’ll create a gallery for them and people can tell me where they should go.

Fats

Quick Question

Do people want a light or dark theme, or have the ability to choose either?

Let me know.

fats

I vote for light, but chosing will be excellent.

OK, work on the new version is going well, what I need from people is an idea of what colour you want with a dark theme,

it needs to work with the masthead




Please let me know what colour you think the dark theme should be.

Fats

Perhaps a dark blue.

OK, here is a quick update.

The library, forum, comments, blog are all in place and working, the masthead is also there as well as the front page elements, what's not working is the menu and the positing of the menu, I was hoping to move the menu from the old version to the new version but it now looks like I’m going to have to build that from scratch, annoying but no biggie. The big development is the ability for users to change the colours on the site to their own colours, so no need for me to upload 2 or 3 templates one for light, dark and black, you can change no only the background colour but the text colour and links as well. I was hoping to have some screen shots ready for today but it's now looking at Friday for the screen shots.

I will keep people up to date with the developments over the coming days.

Fats

just to remind users that the site will be down tomorrow.

Fats