elorg.net

I’ve gone through so many forum solutions over the years. I moved to bbPress at some point a while ago because I was tired of trying to integrate Vanilla with WordPress. Unfortunately, bbPress doesn’t seem to be updated often, and is seriously lacking… almost everything.

I think it’s time to move back to Vanilla (again). It integrates so much better, and even though I absolutely loved it the last time I used it, it looks so much slicker now.

I’ve been doing some tinkering, and it’s NOT going to be an easy process. There’s a script that’s supposed to help with the migration – but it fails horribly for me no matter what I do to try to coerce into behaving. I’ve mapped out a lot of the fields (maybe I should actually write all of that down and share it) and that portion isn’t so bad. It’s the differences in the way that bbPress and Vanilla each store the content of the first post of each topic that’s going to be the biggest pain. Thankfully my little forum is pretty low traffic, so I can take my time.

So far I’ve tried a LOT of different approaches, and ruled them all out. I think I have a game plan now, and just need to sit down for a day and get it done. I’m hoping it actually works and I’m not wasting my time. It’s not entirely a waste though – I consider myself a database n00b, and hacking through all of this is teaching me quite a bit.

I’ve been resurrecting a couple of older “sitelets” from my ancient website backups.

Make-URL lives again (and with its own domain)! I still have a bunch of “features” and checks to it, but it works. Mostly. Keep checking back.

I also brought back my little site dedicated to the progress of my design classes. I still like the overall look and feel. It’s nothing fancy, but it’s nice and uses a bit of PHP for the snazzy side menu, navigation, and setting the page titles. I’m just updating the content and doing a bit of housecleaning on it. I hope to at least have this one done before the end of the weekend. The Make-URL site will probably be several weeks before I consider it “finished.”

As part of my New Year’s resolution, I’m going to finally make good on all of the websites for local stores/restaurants that I’ve been wanting to do. I have all of these great ideas. Hopefully they’ll feel the same way and take me up on my offer.

So far I have my favorite restaurant – the owner has been wanting a web site for ages. I tried to approach him about it when I was unemployed – er… freelance? – but he already had a designer (who, 3+ yrs later has yet to produce anything as far as I can tell). Not like I’m much better. We’ve been talking about doing a website for him since… November? But then we found the house and started stressing out over getting the loan. Then DST.

Now is the time. I need it. I need to be more creative before IT burns me out or something.

I also just got an email from an old client. He was great to work for and would love to do some more work for him again. I just hope this time around I don’t end up having my day job completely suck all of my free time away from me again so I can actually complete his projects in a timely manner.

Anyway.

I just found out that there’s a tutorial to integrate WordPress and Vanilla. I’m going to try to implement it in a dev area to see how much I like it. Especially since there’s a new version of both scripts out now. I’ve been wanting to find one CMS to manage my entire site (journal, forum, static pages, etc), but have been unhappy with any of the solutions that I’ve looked at so far. Either their GUI completely sucks, it outputs html full of tables for the layout design (yuck!!), or it’s great – but far too complicated to try to figure out how to implement / template…

I think I’ll try this first. If I don’t like it… I’ll neglect my site for a bit longer while I work on client projects and revisit it when I get inspired again.

=)