Two Weeks and Counting -- November 2nd!

[Michael Morris]

Two Weeks and counting... The revision is coming.

EN2 has 4 major launch features. A revamped custom news engine, vbulletin 3.6.8, OpenAds 2.4, and the reviews. Also take a look around folks at the skin and buttons - the look of ENWorld will be completely different after the upgrade. It's been 3 years, time to leave the crypt for something a bit brighter.

As of this writing Open Ads 2.4 is integrated into vbulletin on dev, and vbulletin is happily running under version 3.6.8. The skinning is ongoing and should be completed by the end of next week. News and reviews come next.

The upgrade will not be easy or short. It's been 3 years and we're behind. Also my recent mistake with the mv command has seriously damaged the code infrastructure of the site. Friday November 2nd the development forum will be activated at a preview URL. All of it's forums will be locked except for meta. A two week shakedown process will be begun to try to level out any remaining issues with the board. If all goes according to plan the final transfer will occur November 16th - 18th (ENWorld is likely to be down that entire weekend). After this if necessary the old site will remain up for around 6 weeks as an archive.

There will be things lost on the first pass, but many have been so glitchy for so long their use has dropped to nearly nill. For example the secure downloads area, the vb links and the gallery. These features will be restored as quickly as possible - restoring them once the core functionality is revised will be much easier than trying to work on them alongside the core.

All dates given are subject to change, but not by much. The transition will be entirely over no later than Christmas, and new features will begin appearing in January.

 

[Michael Morris]

Trying to anticipate some questions here.

1. What Browsers will I need?
For best results you will need IE 7, Firefox 2, Safari 2, or Opera 9. Some pages will eventually make user of the Flash 9 player. Any browser capacle of implementing Javascript DOM 1 should work.

2. What, no IE 6???
IE 6 will work, but the framework that powers the site will refuse to send it any PNG images to IE 6 and instead send *.gif images. Though the site functions, there is a very noticable drop in image quality. Given the alternative though - the "ugly gray box" phenomena - this isn't too bad.

3. What about my PDA?
EN2 is almost entirely CSS2 driven. There are a few tables - this is a forum after all and listing of threads and forums are by their very nature tabular data. But unecessary tables are gone. The post bits are created entirely in CSS2.

Again IE 6 suffers slightly. Occasionally fixed widths have to be used on IE 6 instead of flex widths since IE 6 doesn't support the CSS max- and min-width/height properties. Best results will be seen in Opera 9 - here inline block element controls are fed to the browser instead of sometimes unpredictable floats. (the inline-block property is the last major remaining CSS 2.1 standard that no browser other than Opera gets right. Opera is the only CSS 2.1 compliant browser).

Not though that no browser will have a version that is illegible or unusable. Comprimises will be done that correspond to the limitations of each browser respectively.

3. I turn off javascript on my browser for security.
You'll have to turn it on. EN2 is largely Ajax powered.

4. You mentioned Flash
No launch element will use Flash. However there are planned additions to the site that will probably be written in Actionscript - though they may as of yet be written using Ajax.

Any other questions?

 

[stonegod]

Any other questions?

What about RSS/Atom for either user subscribed threads or individual threads/etc.?

 

[Nyaricus]

OH wow, I had no idea that ENW was just about to upgrade to it's new incarnation. I can't wait to see it

cheers,
--N

 

[Michael Morris]

What about RSS/Atom for either user subscribed threads or individual threads/etc.?

RSS support is in the core of vbulletin 3.6.8. I do not know at this time if this support will extend to the news area but it likely will - eventually.

 

[Michael Morris]

Now for those who don't want to be spoiled don't click the link below. It's a picture of the new layout.

http://www.enworld.org/images/en2preview1.png

 

[Merlin the Tuna]

Will there be alternate site skins available by changing user account settings? Those oranges just did a number on my retinas.

 

[Michael Morris]

There are many, many, many things that have a higher priority than alternate skins. And as heavily modified as this one is (and the javascript infrastructure linked to it) it isn't possible just to import a skin from a vb site. Once the site is live it will be clear why. Light text on a dark field is extremely rare for a reason, it's hard on the eyes, especially once you get used to dark text on a light field.

 

[blargney the second]

Nice! Ditching the tables should really speed up load times. Can't wait to see the new baby - thanks for showing us a picture.

 

[CharlesRyan]

Sounds and looks great--can't wait!