Week Thirty-Four – Moving Content Will Be A Chore

Lots of stuff to report this week, as we are doing great things in the background. That’s the Royal ‘We’, meaning the ones they call Guru and Switchblade who are the proper clever ones. Huge amounts of stuff have been translated for our change from vBulletin’s forum software platform and the Joomla magazine format we currently use, to having everything entirely under one suite of framework from Invision Power. Namely, the IPB and IPC or Boards (forums) and Content, (in our case, the Talk Audio magazine) and they have a much more straightforward modus operandi which means I can post articles and news far faster, with all sorts of clever automation on things like making sure the pictures are the right size and fit on the page. All without having to nag the webmaster…. 

The IPB forums have an auto-populating code for transposing vB content, (which is just as well, as we are up to 3.9m posts – odd) but as for Joomla, it looks like the 800 articles and half million words I’ve done over the last threee years will have to be re-posted and link-informed to Google, entirely by hand! Like building a model boat out of matchsticks, it may take a while, even if the frame of the work I have done so far gets put up quite quickly!
Crucially, from my very own magazine editor’s point of view, all the banners that promote the likes of Alpine, Clarion, Vibe and so forth remain in the same places, with headers and footers for the forum pages and the magazine front pages alike, as well as the two ads that live on the magazine pages.
Just like paper mags, the classic format is followed that Talk Audio is funded by those who know our readership is one they want to talk to and irritating though they may be to some users (others just go banner-blind) they are a vital part of life. I love them of course as they show proof that the magazine and Talk Audio is taken seriously by Very Important Players in the 12Volt market and that’s my life’s passion!
So, in the week that saw us lose one of our oldest site technicians, gathered absurdly too early, we are firmly eyes set upon a new horizon, which since this is the Internetz, is no bad thing.
I’ll go get on then….
Adam Rayner – Online Editor