I wanted to post a diary about some upcoming changes here at theforvm, so that everyone can understand what's going to happen, why it's going to happen and what the effects will be.

First, we have come to the point where we really need to update the site. The version of Drupal that we are running (4.7.4) is no longer supported. I downloaded the entire site onto a test machine, went through the upgrade process (to version 5.7), and am testing the results. The only problem I've had so far is that the menu links at the top of the page ( Home Diaries Foreign Affairs Politics ...) do not work and had to be turned off. It appears that they were a customization by WetherMan that isn't supported in the current version, or at least not supported in a way that's easy to fix. Other than that it looks pretty good, really just abouyt exactly the same as it is now with the major changes being in the administration menus.

I still plan to upgrade the site to Drupal 6.1, but it will probably be a few months until that version is feature complete and stable enough for a production site. Drupal does not support a direct upgrade from v4.7.4 to v6.1, so I will have to do the upgrade in stages anyway.

I also plan to develop a new theme for the site, since the theme we are currently using is not supported in the newer version. I will be trying to develop a theme that is as close as possible to the default theme that comes with Drupal (Garland, for those interested enough to check it out). There are a couple of reasons for this, but the main ones are that it makes maintenance easier, there's better support for the default theme or one close to it, and it will make future upgrades much, much easier. I should say that the stuff I've been playing around with looks really good, there's support for all kinds of stuff like drop down menus and client side AJAX support (in non-tech terms, that means a prettier site with snappier response). The biggest deal is that the new version has promised support for searching comments by author. However the new theme will not be implemented until v6.1 is stable, although I may try to make it available before that so you guys can play around with it and see what you think.

I'll try to complete my testing of the upgrade in the next few days, and I will try to actually perform the upgrade next weekend, probably late Sunday the 13th. That appears to be the time that the site experiences the least traffic. There is always a small chance that even though I went through the update with actual site data I may experience a problem that causes the site to be down for an extended period of time. I don't think it's likely, but it is possible. My guess is that the upgrade will take anywhere from .5 - 2 hours.

I'll also mention that if there is anyone who has technical skills and wants to learn Drupal, or already has skills in PHP and CSS, feel free to volunteer :).
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I blame it all on the Internet