PortlandHikers.org is moving!

Portlandhikers is approaching its two year anniversary this month.  We’ve seen a lot of growth, a lot of fresh faces, and a ton of great trip reports and photos in this time. So much so, that we’re now a victim of our own success!  We’ve outgrown our database capacity on our current hosting environment with GoDaddy.  GoDaddy and Community Server (our forum software) have made it difficult and very expensive to upgrade. So we’ve decided to make a clean break. 

We are going to re-launch PortlandHikers on a new hosting service and with a new forum software.  We are in the process of testing different software to find one easy-to-use, that allow us to share photos seemlessly, and multi-browser friendly.   At first, it will be like we're starting over again.  However, in short order we should have everything pieced together again.

There will be a ton of questions, and I’ll try to answer some here. 

Q: Are we going to lose all the old trip reports and other content?

A: No.  For the short term all the current content will remain available on the old site which will serve as an archive as people start posting new reports on the new site.  In the coming weeks and months we're going to transition all the old forums, threads and posts into the new software. 

Q: When are you getting started?

A: Fairly soon!  Probably by the beginning of June.  As you probably already experienced, there have been significant problems posting in the month of May.  This is due to our limited remaining database space.  We’ve run whatever scripts we have to squeeze out a bit more time, but it’s only postponing the inevitable.

Q: Will be still be able to use the old site?

A: Yes and No.  Yes you will be able to view threads and posts on the old site, but after a certain cutoff you will no longer be able to post to the old site.

Q: Will we need to create a new login?

A: We plan to migrate all the current usernames.  We can’t move the passwords over since they are encoded.  The plan is to give each of you a new unique password and have you change it upon your first login.  This may be a bit of a clunky process but we hope people will resist the urge to create a new login for themselves.  This will confuse things later as we bring all the old trip reports and other posts forward.

Q: Will anything get lost?

A: Yes - private messages will be lost.  You will want to make copies of any conversations you’d like to save.  The gallery photos on the PH site will be transitioned to the new site, but it’s unclear to us what form they’ll eventually take.  There may be other things we identify as our transition path takes shape.

Q: Should I copy my own stuff to the new site?

A: No.  We'd rather you didn't.  It will complicate things later!

Q: What’s this going to cost?

A: The transition may cost few hundred dollars.  We have this covered from the calendar fund raiser last fall.  However, depending on what forum software we choose, it may be significantly cheaper than this.

Q: Will you become a pay site?  Offer advertising?

A: We will not become a pay site, and we will continue to run completely ad-free.  We are looking at options for becoming a non-profit.

Q: What forum  hosting services are you moving to?

A: We've decided on BlueHost.  Our FieldGuide has been hosted by BlueHost for about a year now and they have been great!  They run Linux Servers, and will offer mySQL as a backend.  Their administrative tools are much better and give us much more finite control over backups, cleanup scripts and configurations. 

We have been evaluating two forum softwares: vBulletin  and phpBB.  These are the de-facto industry standards and each have many plug-ins, configurations, and skins to help us customize the site to our liking.  Each has a significant online support community – something which was somewhat lacking for our version of Community Server.  Using something popular also increases the chance that you folks will already be used to how it works due to your experience on other sites. (for instance, NWHikers.net uses phpBB.  Don't worry our look will be a lot different even if we use the same software)

Q: How long will the transition take?

A: Once we have the software up-and-running, configured and well-tested we'll flip the switch overnight and the ph.org url will take you to the new site from that point on.  So in that respect the transition will be instantaneous. 

However, transitioning all the old content to the new site, might take awhile - perhaps even a few months.  We're not sure yet. 

Q: Didn’t we upgrade last summer?

A: Kinda.  We had actually planned to do this big migration last summer, but were able to convince GoDaddy to double our database size and transition us to a faster application server to buy us some time.  So then our intent was to do the transition over the winter when our traffic was a lot lower, but many of our folks have been dedicating a lot of time to the Trails Association project, so this plan slipped until now when it just can’t wait anymore!

Q: How can I help?

A:  Patience and constructive criticism will help!  We’ll also need a few guinea pigs – if you can give us some significant attention to beta test the new software we'd like to hear from you. 

This new site should be a whole ton better. The point is to have much more consistent and reliable performance, be friendlier to Mac/Safari/Firefox users, and overall be easier to use.  However keep in mind, the new site will be different than the old one.  There will be a learning curve - so take a little time to read the Faqs and How-tos as they become available. 

Thanks!

Jeff, Dan, Steve and Jane