Thanks for your hard work.

@eol, will you still be able to provide Tapatalk support, making browsing on mobiles, so much easier?

Good luck, sounds great!

Yes. It might not be available right away but plugin does exist. Please give me time to migrate major features (forums, portal, galleries) and I'll be glad to add any neat plugins users may find useful after that. Feel free to remind me about Tapatalk next week.

*thumbsup* Thanks @eol.

Please do not post anything on forum until further notice. We're in the middle of migration to a new platform and anything posted during that process will be lost.

All visitors are urged to read this post in full for details of the latest upgrade which resulted in the site being unavailable for a week.

Why upgrade?

LAShTAL.COM was beginning to show its age. In terms of its visual impact, for example, one member recently described it as looking like a 'car rental website' and another, not to be outdone, as looking like a 'car crash.' Add to this, the site was not 'responsive' and, as a result, didn't look great on mobile devices.

Built on the 'Joomla!' platform, LAShTAL.COM was becoming increasingly slow, sometimes frustratingly so, and introducing additional functionality became problematic. Behaviour of the Forums software (built on the 'SMF' platform) was becoming erratic, with more than one user complaining that posts were not appearing when saved and the accidental loss of a whole thread during a simple moderation task.

What has been upgraded?

In short, News and other functionality has been exported (or sometimes laboriously copy-and-pasted) from 'Joomla!' into a new, professionally designed site. The 80,000+ Forum posts have been imported into the industry-standard phpBB application. The two platforms (main site and forums) have been integrated using professionally-sourced software. All this technically challenging work has been completed by eol, without complaint and with the greatest enthusiasm throughout.

The site has been given a lick of paint, too. On the basis of 'Accessibility' concerns, the old 'blue and light brown' theme has been replaced by a far more modern set of colours and with graphics provided at short notice by the remarkably generous Aaron Tatum.

Add to all of this greatly enhanced integration with modern social media functionality and you have a LAShTAL.COM site that is ideally placed to meet the need of members in the future.

What's been lost?

Inevitably, a site as large and as old as this couldn't be migrated to a modern platform without some impact on content. Those I'm aware of include:

- News posts have lost their author details - all published items to date are shown as having been written by 'lashtal'. This will be corrected in due course.
- Passwords need to be re-authenticated. Members details have been retained but the site will prompt for the password to be authenticated.
- Quotes in Forum posts haven't imported well - the text is there, still, but not as elegantly as before. Again, this will be corrected in due course.

What's left to be done?

The main objective has been to retain News and Forums and to minimise downtime. As a result:

- The Galleries are currently offline: they will return soon.
- The Blogs have, against my better judgement but as the result of strident complaints from two members, been retained. However, Blog posts are having to be manually copied-and-pasted so not all are yet available.
- Downloads are being retained but adding the files manually means only a couple are available so far.

Just one more thing...

As the result of member requests, I've decided to retain the Babble On chat box. Use it or lose it! There is an option to add specific Chat Boxes to individual News items.

I trust that this very significant upgrade, involving a great deal of work by eol, Aaron and me, not to mention investment in professional add-ins, meets with the approval of members. Please feel free to leave Comments to this post with your observations, or use the post-specific Chat Box below for something spontaneous.

Since my fiancee has moved in I have not had much time but I was checking this site at work and it was closed and I really like this upgrade a lot so far! 🙂

Everyone posting here in the Forums will have received a notice that their post had to be approved. This is clearly not what I want to happen but I'm struggling to get the software to do as I tell it!

Rest assured that I have no plans whatsoever in the longer term to have to pre-approve every single forum post. 😉

This seems to have been fixed - please let me know if your experience is different!

Testing

Not fixed, because i just got the message that my previous post consisting of the word "testing" needs approval.

This one was my bad - I didn't setup permissions well for this sub-forum only. It should work OK now, please test.

Testing again.

Works now.

Many thanks.

Looking Good!

Is RSS still available for the Forums and if so, what's the URL?

Yes - feed.php and topics RSS: feed.php?mode=topics

I need to remember to add button somewhere on the index page for that.

Excellent! now i needn't be anxious that i'll miss out on any of the passive aggressive bickering in the coming weeks. thanks again for all your work!

You are welcome. I have RSS buttons to my TODO list. There is still a lot of work to be done but I like what we've done so far and I'm glad that members like it too. 🙂

yes, everything seems quite snappy!

🙂

Yo! Looks good so far..a lot of work has gone into this upgrade

@frater_anubis wrote:

Yo! Looks good so far..a lot of work has gone into this upgrade

eol devoted an enormous amount of time and effort into migrating the main site and its forums to this new platform. And Aaron continues to be able to produce exactly what I had in mind graphically from just a few words. I am blessed to have the support of these two fine people.

Well - Lashtal didn't loose any of my posts, praised be to Aiwass. Thelemites everywhere owe a debt of gratitude to this site, which in true Crowley tradition will never be repaid of course:}}

I feel a new magickal current is developing from the new Lashtal website. May the Clear White Light flow on and upwards towards the culmination of your Great Work, Hari Aum!

@frater_anubis wrote:

praised be to Aiwass!

Praise be to eol & lashtal 😉
Aiwass has not yet been to phpBB school 😮

Looking good. One suggestion. When you arrive at the new forum it's difficult to get a handle on where recent activity has taken place, something like a list of the 10 most recently updated threads would be great. Just an idea.

I like the look and feel and the artwork.

@Hamal wrote:

Looking good. One suggestion. When you arrive at the new forum it's difficult to get a handle on where recent activity has taken place, something like a list of the 10 most recently updated threads would be great. Just an idea.

I like the look and feel and the artwork.

Just so I can check that I understand what you mean: do the 'New Posts' and 'Unread Posts' buttons at the top right not serve this purpose? Or the 'Recent Forum Posts' list on the right hand side of the main LAShTAL home page?

@lashtal wrote:

@Hamal wrote:

Looking good. One suggestion. When you arrive at the new forum it's difficult to get a handle on where recent activity has taken place, something like a list of the 10 most recently updated threads would be great. Just an idea.

I like the look and feel and the artwork.

Just so I can check that I understand what you mean: do the 'New Posts' and 'Unread Posts' buttons at the top right not serve this purpose? Or the 'Recent Forum Posts' list on the right hand side of the main LAShTAL home page?

Ah ha! Excellent. Both are good, but the "New posts" link at the top is ideal for my purposes. Many thanks! 😀

The ability to search the Forums was omitted by me in error. So... Option to search Forums added to LAShTAL. Search box appears when you click on the Forums menu option. Sorry for the omission.

Any clues on why this place has been Deadsville of late, Paul? What has been the rate of signing in and generating new passwords since that became necessary with the New New Forum Software? i assume pretty high, since the very prominent message about needing to pick a new password has vanished.

It seems like many folks are looking in from time to time, but there have been few posts, or replies, of late. Of course, I suppose i could become "a part of the solution", if only i could think of anything to talk about.

😉

We're getting far more (non-spam) membership sign-ups since moving to the new format, with very substantial numbers of visitors and page hits. What we don't have yet is a proportionate increase in use of the Forums. There are doubtless many reasons for this: a few of the more opinionated members (those seemingly with an opinion on everything) haven't made the transition to the new format; some members may find the new Forum software daunting (it's certainly not as user-friendly as the old software) and I've published as News items some of the articles that would previously only have appeared in the Forums.

Ultimately, members will use the Forums if they find them useful: it's no skin off my nose if members prefer to use the site for other, more passive, purposes.

Sounds good, and many of those new folk may yet choose to post/reply to forums. As you say, the site provides an awful lot besides forums.

At least some of us with opinions on every topic have made the migration.

I find the new Lashtal software not at all daunting or user-hostile, and in fact like it better so far, except for the more limited "Recent Forum Posts" listing on the right margin (which i like less well than the list of recent posts that used to appear on the bottom of the main forums page), but since few are posting this is a pretty moot point thusfar. Also, is there a "Preview Post" function i am missing?

As always, we all owe you a tremendous debt for maintaining and improving the site. As i imagine you may point out that debts are often dissolvable with copious amounts of £.S.D., I will try to contribute soon.

I dont use the forums so much, simply due to the Tapatalk plugin not workign. I think a few also are inthe same boat @ignant666.
Once its installed again I will be online more here and posting clippings.

Wow, it's like you read my mind!

But you didn't did you?

DID YOU?!?!

Yes William, I am in your head.

Actually Paul (LAShTAL) is in my head reading my mind - that's why he re-enabled search! While you are in my head just loafing off by watching kittens on youtube!

Ah, cracked it - had to get paul to reset my password - testing testing 123..

I understand from eol, @ptoner that Tapatalk is proving problematic - it's not been updated for a while and support aren't answering their emails... Rest assured, though: if it's possible to integrate it with the site then @eol is the chap to do it!

I am sorry to say that the new site, pretty and all that it is, is unbelievably slower to load for me. This has had the result of me visiting much less than I used to. Unfortunately, in Australia especially, many us of have dreadful internet speeds and more and more sites (Australian govt sites as well!!) assume that you can load things as quickly as people in, for examples, large cities. But alas, it makes the experience frustrating.

Welcome back on board, @frater_anubis

We got there in the end! 😉

Sorry to hear that the site is slow for you, @Mazus

I now live in rural Oxfordshire so I can assure you that the site has been developed with low-bandwidth users in mind! 😉

I'll add it to the list of things requiring further work...

Yes, @lashtal, I will do my best to make it work. There seems to be an issue with the fact that Tapatalk has two plugins - one for Wordpress and one for bbPress. The problem is - we're using both. I have contacted support but have yet to hear from them.

As for other things - I am terribly sorry but I am currently very busy at work so I can't spend as much time as I'd like on LAShTAL. I should become more available in a week or two.

As for speed of our site - WP is working really fast but I'll see about making things more optimized for slower connections.

93
Thanks Paul, it's good to be back - nothing ever seems to be straightforward with the dark art of website migration, but I'm glad that eol has mastered it!

Dont know if this helps @eol. Though something tells me you prob already done this.
https://support.tapatalk.com/threads/wordpress-error.30952/

Been there, done that. Didn't work. 🙁 I'll figure it out one way or another, don't worry. 🙂

@ptoner can you, please, try it again? Taptalk website no longer shows an error from LAShTAL after I made some changes but I'm not sure it works.

I'm in like Flynn!
Thank you so much @eol , seems to be working now. Browsing via Tapatalk and posting this response.