Jazz-Sax, all things Jazz and Sax
We had some downtime yesterday, due to me upgrading the Ubuntu server software to the latest version. Of course the latest version also included the latest Apache Webserver, which of course, changed some of the server configuration commands. It took me a while to get it working.
Someday I’d love to move everything to a hosted setup, but……
Also updated the WordPress software and changed the theme. Whoohoo!
We sorta had some forums here, but they were lame. WordPress+Buddypress’s built in forum software sucked hard. Really hard. So, this weekend I was going to install BBPress but then discovered SimplePress. And that is what we are using now. Ties into the WordPress software nicely. Seems good so far.
This has been on my list of things to do to Jazz-Sax, and now I have. We have gone BuddyPress now. This hopefully will enable more things to happen here, like Forum discussions, and perhaps some sort of group calendar for people’s upcoming gigs, etc, etc. Lots of possibilities. If anyone has any good recommendations on a theme for BuddyPress that would be cool. Or some good plugins for it.
Activity: http://www.jazz-sax.com/activity/
Members: http://www.jazz-sax.com/members/
Groups: http://www.jazz-sax.com/groups/
Forums: http://www.jazz-sax.com/forums/
Register: http://www.jazz-sax.com/register/ (This one doesn’t seem to work at the moment)
UPDATE: Ok, seems my Apache server was configured incorrectly. Things seem to work now.
Ok, finally found and got around to installing and tweaking a new WordPress theme for the site. I like it better than the old one. It supports threaded comments (whoohoo), and generally looks more professional. I might change the colors around a little though.
Let me know if there are any issues or anything.
This site is currently using a crappy WordPress theme that I don’t particularly care for anymore. I am looking into Carrington Theme as soon as they have support for WordPress 2.7 nested comments. However, I thought I’d post this up to see if anyone has any other ideas for a theme. It does need to have support for a banner ad though.
I was also thinking perhaps of doing something similar to my personal site, where I took the Deskmess theme and tweaked it a little. Or maybe the Japan Style one and tweak it a little. These themes need to really support 2.7 better (nested comments, etc) before I do that though.
Ideas?
Ok, after some tinkering, I think everything is working ok. The biggest problem was getting the site to send out Emails for new users and existing users who are subscribed to receive updates. If anyone is experiencing anything strange, drop me a post or email.
Ok, after a LOT of work on my end, 98% of the stories and files have been moved to WordPress. They have all been put into 4 categories, and tagged. Though, the tagging might need to be revistited in the future.
Things not moved are the user ids from the old slash site. Journals have not been moved either. Polls and the comments in them are one of the things that still need to be moved, and will be done so by the end of the weekend. The other thing that has not been moved yet is the player setup database I had. Not sure how I’m going to do that one at the moment…….I might need to learn a little PHP to do that.
There might be some links in stories that do not work. If anyone see these, please shoot me an email and a story link. These are kind of hard to find and fix…….
UPDATED 10/6/07 11:50PM by E: Ok, it’s done. The Slash site is offically gone. Perl has been removed from the Apache webserver. Memories of Slashcode start to fade…..
Upgrading to WordPress 2.3 was painless. However, they did change a number of things. Categories and Tags. Kind of confusing, but here is a quote to better explain it:
So categories can be tags but tags cannot be categories. Categories are like the huge signs you see on aisles in supermarkets – “Food”, “Hygiene”, “Frozen” etc, they guide you to sections where you can find what you are looking for. Tags are like the labels on the products themselves.
So, in an effort to clean up my categories, I’ve been tagging. Though, it is, like moving over the old Slash content, going to take some time.
Yeah, things look different. WordPress allows you to really mess with the look of a site really, really easily. So, we are trying this one out……
I think it is more of what I want it to look like……
UPDATE: 09/23/07 4:30 PM by E: Added an Archives page
UPDATE: 09/24/07 1:50 PM by E: Moved the Submit Article to the menu
UPDATE: 09/24/07 9:20 PM by E: Upgraded to WordPress 2.3. Woot!
UPDATE: 09/25/07 12:35 AM by E: Tags……I’m not quite sure what to make of them yet……
Looks like things have settled down after the transition from Slash to WordPress. First, on the right you’ll see the Be Active header. Here you can write articles, questions, interesting things you saw on the net or heard about. Second, there are still about 300+ stories that have not been migrated from Slash to WordPress. It probably will be a couple of weeks until everything appears again.
Welcome to the new Site. Most all of the stories and comments transfered over. The ones that have not should be migrated over in the next week or two.
I think there might be some problems with the Login thing. Can someone check it out and post about it?
Fixed the Download problem I think……maybe……
Also fixed a cache problem. I think it works better now…..now if I could only get the old slash site up to continue to move stories and files over…….
Update 8/29/07, well, there still are about 500 some stories that need to be sifted through. It is long, and boring, and long and boring……but it is going. Hopefully some of the other patterns and pdfs will be up soon.
Update 8/31/07. Still have something like 500 stories/articles to sift through. Erg…..Hopefully sped things up here with some caching and some MySQL tuning.