by Darren » Sun Aug 26, 2007 8:53 am
lol, it hasnt happened yet.
After quite some time conflabbing with the hosting provider yesterday there is going to be a 2 stage move and this has caused some serious rethink of how this site operates in the future. Mainly for maintenance purposes.
Firstly, the site will move to a new server with PHP4 installed in the UK. Hopefully nothing should break during that move.
(PHP is a software language not doo dissimilar to the likes of C and Perl and is the scripting/interpreter engine the site uses to access databases, run the forum etc).
Secondly, PHP4 will be end of life I believe at the back end of this year. Therefor, the site code needs to be migrated to the newer PHP5. This may, or may not prove to be very problematic given alot of the code on this site was written for PHP4 approx 2 years ago.
To do this the site will be migrated to a test server with PHP5 installed so that I can assess the damage and the work to update and go through the few thousand lines of code.
Although it has come to mind that as I have been thinking for quite some time I would like to put a new site together this major migration might be a good time to do it. To simplify it's structure significantly, new design and layout. The forum layout may change slightly for a short period of time during this process, but hopefully I'll manage to keep all the content and usability.