Welcome To The New WFB Site – Please Pardon The Mess
Welcome to The Winchester Family Business: The Upgrade.
This was several months overdue, but we finally moved to our new server! It’s bigger, it’s better, it’s dedicated, so hopefully all those nasty errors and mind numbing slowness you were getting from the site the last few months is a thing of the past. In moving to the new server we also upgraded our Joomla platform (since our old one was woefully outdated) and got a new template to boot. It’s certainly a whole new look and feel compared to the old site layout.
We did all we could to get the site functioning with our core stuff, but as you can tell there are still several rough spots on the site. I’ll be working to fix those in the next few days. If you see something wrong that you need to report, either leave a comment in this article or send a message through “Contact Us.” We will still be publishing articles as we work all this stuff out, so your routine of discussion and diversion for all things Supernatural will not be interrupted.
Thank you everyone in advance for your patience. In the meantime, I hope you like the changes.
Alice Jester is the founder, editor-in-chief, head writer, programmer, web designer, site administrator, marketer, and moderator for The Winchester Family Business. She is a 30 year IT applications and database expert with a penchant for creative and freelance writing in her spare (ha!!) time. That’s on top of being a wife, mother of two active kids, and four loving (aka needy) pets.
I got so scared when my WFB didn’t open, I panicked! Ouf, I’m glad that it’s just a new configuration, had to change my password though, but hey, no biggy. 🙄
Hey, sorry, I ment to tell you kudos! I can be such an idiot sometimes. :-* You work so bloody hard to keep us happy. Many thanks. 😉
Lookin’ good! It’s speedy and sleek too!
Fast! And looking good.
It’ll take a while for me to find my way around the new format, but what better way to spend hellatus!
🙂
Hopefully no more errors, too! Thanks Alice, and congrats on the change.
Lovely shinny and new
Still feels familiar but with a zest of lemon twist. Well done and thanks for all the hard work
Funny Kaz. 🙂
Thanks for all the work keeping up the place. It will take a little time to get used to the new layout, but I’m sure I will love it when I do. I’m an old fuddy duddy who doesn’t like change, but this looks good.
Loved this new layout… It’s so cool…
Congrats…
You guys are always suprising me…
Take care… 😉
It looks sharp and runs fast. I like. Thanks so much for all of your hard work, Alice.
Good evening Alice,
I tried to get to tWFB on Internet Explorer 7, and I get an error message. Will this be corrected or do I need to upgrade my IE?
Thanks Nancy
Unfortunately, this new platform won’t work in IE7. You can upgrade your IE (8, 9, and 10 work) or you can get Firefox or Chrome. Both of those work with no problem.
Sorry!
Congrats on the new site! Works great on IPad.
Hi again Alice, thanks for all the help but wanted to let you know that when I log in doesn’t last long before it logs me out again. Will it time me out if I don’t comment right away? Or is this a “bug”?I am enjoying roaming the site. Will there ever be a single recent comment list again? It definitely had it’s advantages. You could see most of the daily comments at a glance. Not complaining mind you, just curious.
I think the current comment system might be very similar on second glance. I thought it was only going to show 1 or 2 comments per article.
I can check into logout times. This is the same commenting system, but it’s a new version. I’ll look into what the timeout rules are. Thanks for letting me know!
We are experiencing the day after the day after hangover or something. We had some database issues, and we’re trying to clear them up. Everything is working okay right now, but fingers crossed.
Just letting you know that the new look is very cool 🙂 works GREAT on the iPad. I love the new layout of the front page. Took a while for me to get used to it, but the lighter background on the articles and the larger photos (mmhmm) work very well. Thanks for taking our suggestions and helping out so much in the past few days, Alice, you do fantastic work.
Thanks! Actually, the larger photos thing was a fluke thing in the new template. I was planning on figuring out a way to downsize those because I thought they were too big. If you like it though, I can keep it. It’s only the header photos.
…But but but Alice, 1000 symbols!!! … [u][b]REALLY[/b][/u]!!!!. How can our Dean and Sam opinions possibly be contained within a1000 word limit. I’ve read opinions on this site, the length of which could rival Ulysses…. Alice [u][i][b]books[/b][/i][/u] I tell you. My lip is so long I now have gravel rash.
Oops, I had no idea that setting existed! It’s a drastic new upgrade to our commenting system, and I guess that’s a new “feature.” I upped that to 5000 words. Better?
Yea, things seem to be calming down. Finally some rest??
Yes, we’ve gone days without a database crash (knock on wood). We were able to figure out some things with the database that went wrong during the upgrade (any techie knows it’s really a conversion, and those don’t go well). There’s still some rough spots, but overall it looks good.
I’m trying to focus now on the “wish list.” We still have one major problem, looking up articles in the article archives by category causes a SQL error. Other than that, it’s looking good.
If anyone has problems that they noticed haven’t gone away or any suggestions of what we should have, now’s the time to send them!
Oh, and I’ll be on vacation staring Saturday! I’ll be in England and won’t be back until July 2nd. Ardeospina and sweetondean will be in charge.
Enjoy your well deserved vacation, alice!
Thanks for all your hard work!
Thanks! I do admit, I love the new features as well. They certainly run better on a server!
Have a great time Alice! We will behave 🙂