It’s the last day of my Holiday break/time off work. I didn’t get as much done with the site as I had hoped to by now though.

In fact, I actually did negative work, and have essentially thrown myself back to 2004.

I updated the site’s code to phpBB 3.1.2 (the latest at the moment) which has over 1000 bug fixes, several new features, and a new code base. Unfortunately, that means that all of the work (aside from fleshing out the style concepts) that I had done, even including the creation of the My Spot page, is incompatible and must be tossed out.

It’s merely a setback…albeit a big one.

So, it’s back to the drawing board with extracting all the components I need to create the My Spot page, and then updating the style to bring it back to where I was with tsn8 before the update. This also means there is no more /tsn8/ directory. To get to the site, it is the normal url, and everyone gets the development theme as I rebuild it, since the tsn.7 theme is incompatible and gone.

It might be a good time to try and evaluate what I intended to do with what I should have done – which is not re-code every template file, but instead update the layout to do what I wanted with minor tweaks. After all…not every website has to conform to the misconception that “tables are bad, divs are God’s containers,” especially when it comes to tabular data like forums.

There are a lot of new features with the updated boards, some of which I was going to try and build myself, but now I do not have to.

I would have done the update sooner, but for the majority of December the phpbb site was down as a result of a hack. It’s a good thing I didn’t though, because the instructions for installing the update were not the same as previous updates – and all but a few files had to be deleted from the server…something I didn’t see with their site being down.

So, it’s back to the code, to rebuild the site and its key features.