Upgrading and migrating the LinuxCNC Forum

Recently we have had several outages of the LinuxCNC website and forum. These occur because our site uses very old software versions. From time
to time, the hosting provider sends us e-mail reminders to upgrade, and disables the website temporarily as "encouragement".

Unfortunately, there is no automated upgrade process from these very old versions to current supported versions. This is why up to now we have taken the easy way out and reenabled the website without making the version upgrades reqested by the hosting provider.

Now I have done the necessary work to migrate the existing forum to current versions (Joomla 3.4 and Kunena 4.0.6 for those keeping track at home) on a new hosting provider. I believe I have successfully copied all users, posts, and attachments to a new testing system.

Here are some things that are known to be missing from the new site that will not prevent the migration:

• the user map feature is gone
  
• most user profile pictures are gone
  
• not all user permissions (such as forum moderator) will be automatically migrated

If the reports are generally positive and I'm able to fix any show-stopping problems that are found by your testing, then my plan is to:

• announce a date and time at which we will make the current forum read-only
  
• do the migration work a second time, getting all accounts, posts, and attachments copied over to the new system
  
• enable the new website at forum.linuxcnc.org/ and redirect from www.linuxcnc.org/forum/ to the new forum
  
• at a later time, switch www.linuxcnc.org to a static site generator

By doing this, we will be in a better position to keep our forum software up to date, and www.linuxcnc.org will not experience downtime because of problems with the forum software.

I hope that I will be able to do the real migration either the weekend of 7-8 November or 14-15 November.

If you are a technical person already familiar with PHP and Joomla (knowledge of Kunena also helpful) who can commit to the responsibility of maintaining forum.linuxcnc.org and keeping it up to date on a volunteer basis, please get in touch. We could use some help keeping on top of site maintainance.

can't see anything obviously wrong Jeff

Just some style observations, the right hand column seems out of place and overlaps the main content. I would drop the right hand column and reduce the padding to a couple of pixels to maximize the content viewing window. Other than that I can't see anything that does not work.

JT

Someone who is skilled at it can definitely tweak the themes after the migration. The appearance the testing site has now is essentially the original default that the joomla and kunena.

That said, I tried in firefox and chrome at a variety of window widths and never saw the right hand column overlap the main content. Are you using an unusual browser?

I'm just using Firefox on a Windoze XP machine. I just looked again when I open a section up the section numbers are under the right column due to my narrow main window. I keep two windows open at the same time the Firefox and my mail reader. No biggie I'm sure I can sort that out when it is live.

JT

I had a quick look and it seems o.k. and works as it should.
That said, i am (or was) a network admin for several web sites and for some big organisations ( namely United Nations and Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe ) so i can help with the maintenance, or whatever is required.
Regards,
Tom

BTW, i exclusively use Linux on all my laptops and computers (over 15 of them )