CathInfo will be upgraded to new software very soon.
I have been working on the project all week, and all the difficult parts of the transition have been worked out and completed.
I just have a few more things to do, and then I can give everyone a preview of what the new site will look like!
Hopefully I can show off the new site as early as tonight (late).
Old site: Heavily customized version of
Mercuryboard (circa 2006).
New site: Decently modded and customized version of
SimpleMachines Forum (circa 2017)Stay tuned!
P.S. The new site will have all the members, topics, posts, and private messages of the current site. The Likes/dislikes/rep score will be carried over as well. Any currently banned members will still be banned.
Each member will still have the same avatar, signature, e-mail, password, etc.
I'm trying to preserve as much as possible.
And let's not forget: a ton of features that users have come to expect from online message boards in 2017. For example, a WYSIWYG (Microsoft Word-like) Posts editor! That didn't even come with the standard SMF install; I had to pay extra for that commercial plug-in.The only minor data not being preserved are: the ignores, and the "buddy lists". Those features aren't used much anyhow.
The new site will still have an Anonymous subforum, Mens & Womens private subforums, etc.
These features took some work to achieve (the Mens/Womens forum I had to program by hand) but I'm almost there!
The URLs for each post are going to be very human-friendly, but there is no way to do a conversion from the Old to the New.
OLD:
http://www.cathinfo.com/catholic.php/Bishop-ZendejasNEW:
http://www.cathinfo.com/sspx-resistance-news/bishop-zendejas/30/The "30" means "start at post #30".
For the tech nerds:
I don't think it would be feasible for Apache to be able to look up the subforum name for a given post. The redirects are done by Apache (in .htaccess), so it's not a simple lookup to tag on the "sspx-resistance-news".
I think Google will quickly index all the recent/relevant posts on the new site. Any old links will still lead you to the "homepage" or the index page of the subforum, if any. So it's not like the links will be totally broken.