Here are the answers to a few important questions about the update process.

Why are you doing a major update?
What progress have you made?
What's left to do?
Is the new site ready for me to post on yet?

Why are you doing a major update?

Basically, I'm doing this update in order to make the website more fun, exciting, dynamic, and compatible with other sites that I like.

From September of 2005 through June of 2006, this site was running on Geeklog. Geeklog is a Content Management System (CMS), which basically means that it manages a collection of dynamic web pages such as those that make up treesong.org. Using a CMS to run a website makes it so that we can have many interactive pages without having to edit them all manually. Instead, we use a web-based interface to post stories, blog entries, forum posts, etc.

For the year that I've used it, Geeklog has been a wonderful piece of software. It saved a lot of time, and it made the website a lot more dynamic than it had ever been before. So, I must say that I'm still happy with Geeklog, and I would recommend it to anyone who's interested in using it.

However, what I would recommend even MORE is Drupal... :)

Drupal (pronounced "droo-puhl") is a CMS just like Geeklog was. In many ways, it's similar to Geeklog and a dozen others. However, it has a very large and active development community. In other words, a bunch of web designers like me download this software, put it on their website, tweak it to suit their needs, and then help other users to do the same thing. This has lead to a very high quality CMS that can do much more for treesong.org than Geeklog ever has.

So, that's the why. That, and maybe a little bit of masochism, because migrating from Geeklog to Drupal has been a lot of work... :)

What progress have you made?

Here are the first things that I did:

• Installed a blank version of Drupal
• Customized the theme slightly (site name, site slogan, a few green colors, etc.)
• Put the data from the old site's database into the new site's database
• Fiddled with the old site's data so that it would actually kinda-sorta fit into Drupal's data formats
• Moved the old site's fiddled data into the proper portion of the new database so that it would appear on the main page
• Did some more advanced work on the site's theme, including the creation of new "regions" so that the layout will do what I want it to.
• Figured out how to create static pages such as the Shrine of Brighid without having all of the blocks (header, leftbar, rightbar, etc.) appear on them.
• Fixed the dates on the newly imported old stories. [The times were lost in the transfer. If you want to go back and add the proper times to 44 stories manually, be my guest! :)]
• Did a bunch of other random database stuff so that Drupal would not go insane
• Installed a few "modules," which are add-on components for Drupal that let the site do more stuff.

Then, in a second round of manic site updating, I did the following:

• Helped our sister site Your Community Spirit figure out tech stuff related to the podcast. This experience in Drupal troubleshooting/coding will also prove useful for treesong.org and What's left to do?

  For your sake and mine, here's a list of what's left for this update:

  • Comments = For better or worse, there aren't a ton of comments. Most of the user interaction happened in the forums and/or private messages. So, I'll just re-enter the ones from the old site manually.
  • Static Pages = These are things like The Real Matrix that had a different look and feel than the main site. I know how to do them on Drupal now, but haven't transfered most of them yet.
  • Forums = I'll probably just preserve the old forums rather than trying to import their content.
  • Topics = I need to create Topics for my new content (Poetry, etc.).
  • Miscellaneous = There are a dozen little miscellaneous tweaks that I'll need to do to bring in some of the flavor of the old site and make the new one all that it can be.
  • New Stuff = Once all of the above is taken care of, I have a few really cool new features of the site that I'm going to implement. They will make the site more interactive, more sleek in appearance, etc. But those new features are going to be a SURPRISE... :) Stay tuned for more details.

  Is the new site ready for me to post on yet?

  Yes! Feel free to play around as much as you like. Customize your user profile... start your own blog... post a poll... heck, you can even start up a book to be edited collaboratively by other guests of this site. All of the basic functionality is in place... so go ahead and play around as much as you like. That's what it's here for. :)