Admin Announcement: The WFB Conversion Update
An update from your friendly neighborhood administrator. If you noticed, we are on WordPress now! I think the site is loading faster, but we are still in a basic state right now. I’m working on a lot of the behind the scenes maintenance stuff that’s slowing my progress on some things. Here’s the latest:
- I’m working really hard to get our old DISQUS comments restored. DISQUS is throwing some really strange errors when I try the synch feature and troubleshooting has not been going well. I do see all the old comments there in the DISQUS admin area, so I still believe I can retrieve them somehow, especially since it worked without incident during our sister site’s TV For The Rest of Us conversion. Our old comments before the switch to DISQUS in 2016 are there though, so I guess that’s half the battle. In the meantime, new DISQUS comments work, so comment away!
- Photo Galleries are coming, but that will be a project over the next month or two. There’s a lot involved.
- Caption This! is back, as an article going forward. As I mentioned in that game, the Discussion Page is gone. It could not be converted. The plan is to post an archive of the old Discussion Page as view only, but that’s also run into some complications. More to come on that, but the winning entries will be one of the first Photo Galleries created.
- The Video Page is gone for now, maybe permanently. It couldn’t be converted and a lot of the videos weren’t accessible anymore. I’m looking at possible other video gallery solutions.
- The Marketplace is gone. I might create something like that again once we get closer to the holidays, but that will be by demand.
- Contact Us will be up soon! It stopped working on our old site and could never be quite fixed right. It looks like it’ll be a lot better now.
- There are still a few styling items I need to work on, especially when comparing a page loaded on a laptop vs. tablet and mobile. WordPress offers so much more capabilities in those areas so need to take full advantage of those.
- Digging through our archives is now easier than ever! The ‘Search WFB’ function in the right side of the header finds articles quickly and easily based on your search criteria. We also have a new Archive Page that is so much better than before. There is also a new Tags Cloud that will pull up articles quickly by tag. Articles now have a “Similar Posts” section too at the bottom that offer some nice suggestions in our archives to check out. If you want to see posts by any author, just click on the Author’s name in an article by them and it’ll go to a page showing all their articles. Beware if you click on my name, you’ll get 15 years worth of articles! But they are all there.
New articles will be a bit slow coming for the next week or two. I went and changed us to a whole new system and while Nate is more that familiar with WordPress it is a new thing for Nightsky. Some training is needed right now! The same for our writers. I’ve been a bit busy to put together a tutorial so apologies for that. We all will be up to speed soon, so thanks for your patience.
If you have any comments, questions, suggestions send them my way via comments or Contact Us once I get it up.
Thanks,
Alice
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.
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