NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Michael Morris" data-source="post: 3245026" data-attributes="member: 87">Hello everyone. I'll go ahead and answer some of the questions raised in this thread since the existence of the dev board has now been spoiled a little.It's been 2 years since ENWorld has had a meaningful upgrade. In that the makers of the software upon which ENWorld is based has improved greatly. My personal skills as a programmer have also improved a great deal. There are significant security exploits in the software that, although they are closed, still create upgrade headaches.  Hence the need to upgrade the software has become pretty critical.There are parts of the board that, simply put, don't work. The reviews section barely works. The news section serves it's purpose well but could well use not only a facelift but a way to highlight articles and content posted on the forums of this site.EN World 2 is much more than a facelift - though that is a part of it. The very underpinnings of the site will be changed, especially from an administrative side. We're going from using vbadvanced CMPS for news to using Joomla.  Joomla is the world's leading CMS solution and will open up the possibility of providing services and feature which we cannot do on the current platform. Joomla has over 1000 off the shelf components and plugins, compared to a paltry 7 for the vbadvanced platform.  I don't want to talk about specifics at this juncture since we are still fully 3 months away from a launch because I don't want to have anything interpreted as a promised feature.We will also be upgrading to vbulletin 3.6.x which has AJAX posting and quick replies as well as a host of smaller features that makes the lives of the administrators simpler and easier.Both, sorta.  ENWorld 2 has it's own URL and it's locked down at the moment and only open to staff. Currently only the forums work with only amount of accuracy and I'm working on code that bridges user accounts between Joomla 1.5 and vbulletin.  Joomla 1.5 is also in beta, so before we go to production this software must be promoted to final by it's manufacturer.ENWorld 2 will not follow the haphazard upgrade processes we've seen in the past.  Instead it will pass through distinct milestones before it is installed here as the primary board.  I don't want to set firm dates, but each as each milestone is reached it will be announced.PHASE 1: Alpha. This is the current phase.  During this phase the code is built and put through rudimentary testing. It is not considered stable.  Milestones for this phase arePHASE 2: Beta: This phase will start in March (I hope). Russ and I will pick out about 100 of the more active community members to join the staff in trying to break stuff on the beta platform.  During this phase I'm also going to scrub the database and delete remnants from hacks we haven't used in years, like Petz and RPG Inferno.PHASE 3: Beta Release Candidate: This phase will start 4 weeks after the beta at a minimum without a critical bug. At this point the login to the beta boards will be made public to members but it will still be maintained on a seperate db and account area.PHASE 4: Production: I will release the code to production once the release candidate goes two weeks without the discovery of a major bug within it's custom code. At that time the current boards will be converted over.Beyond this phases other projects will then be enoffed to expand the site, but unlike in the past they two will go through this testing process before being added to production.PS -- One fragment of the new boards is being tested - change your stylesheet to Scriptalicious Testing or click below.<a href="http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?p=3245026&posted=1&styleid=89#post3245026" target="_blank">http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?p=3245026&posted=1&styleid=89#post3245026</a></blockquote>

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