The Mailowl Scrolls

The new SA Developer .NET website is up and running; check the new site out and tell me what you think.

The community was sorely in need on an updated forum that supported IE7 and so this last weekend I installed the latest, stable version of Community Server (a .NET community portal used by nearly everyone including Microsoft) and had a slash-dab hand at creating a skin for our new site.

The new website also brings up-to-date forum functionality and provides the admins with the means of editing static pages without having to access the physical files.

This is a new start; with community members having to create new profiles and none of the old forum data being imported. The reasons for this were because we wanted members to have valid email addresses (something best managed through a registering process) and to have an accurate view of our total membership. There was also a lot of bloat in the old forums (they’ve been up for years) and the value of getting the information into the new forums isn’t worth the effort required to get them loaded (the primary difficulty would be linking posts to post authors who have new profiles).

Instead we opted to lockdown the old website and keep it available for searching for anyone who was interested. I plan on keeping the old website up for 6-8 months and to monitor the activity there before shutting it down completely.

I do however intend to import the articles from the old site. My first step is setting up an article writing mechanism (probably abusing the excellent blogging engine in Community Server) and then cleaning up and posting the old articles. I’ve set myself the deadline for the end of February 2007 for completing this.

The new website is still under going some changes to the skin and some tweaking to the various setting available. I still have to complete the static pages with sponsor information, contact details and I’d like to get a history page (which I’ll try and get Ruari to write) up detailing the history of SA Developer .NET.

In the first 24 hours of having the new site up “we have 17 new thread(s), 71 new post(s), and 54 new user(s).” which I think is a pretty good start and I think that’ll improve as the week wears on.