:: View topic - SkiBuilders.com site migration and updates

Dear all,

There will be some changes over the next few months:

Due to the issues that we've all experienced with the existing host, we will be migrating the entire SkiBuilders.com site (including the forum) to a new host. Also, the main website will be updated with a new look. I'm hoping that the migration/updates will be completed by early September, and with minimal issues and disruptions.

The three of us are committed to supporting the community by offering this free service of keeping SkiBuilders.com live. We originally created SkiBuilders.com to address the lack of information and documentation on the design, engineering, and art of ski/snowboard building. It is our hope that this information helps to advance the state-of-the-art. We are very passionate about skiing and building skis is our hobby. Our mission is to provide, archive, and promote ski/snowboard building through SkiBuilders.com.

SkiBuilders.com is now a non-profit LLC, owned and operated by the three of us, and managed by bigKam. SkiBuilders.com will be funded by our own personal contributions and where appropriate, the profit from the sales of SkiBuilders.com related promotional goods.

The SkiBuilders store will no longer be affiliated with SkiBuilders.com. However, a new business will be created to continue to sell materials and supplies (business name to be announced at a later time) and owned and operated by Kelvin Wu. To support the community in terms of where to acquire materials and supplies, we will also provide a detailed list of other sources and vendors.

Thank you again for your support and patience. Please provide any input, comments, etc. to this thread.

Sincerely,

SkiBuilders.com

Wow. Why is it the first thing that popped into my head was "tool".I agree, it's pretty tough making the 14.95 payment a month to "keep the site aiive" so you can sell items to us for 300% over cost. Awesome!

Brazen -- like I said, the forum and the store will be separated. In other words, the money from the new business will not support SkiBuilders.com.

We created SB.com to inform people and to get them excited about making skis. We then created the store to help provide relatively easy access to materials. Yes, there is a markup: to cover costs, such as place to store inventory, accounting fees, covering someone's time, online store fees, banking fees, etc.

There are many places to get materials (search our forum, for example). The cost usually depends on volume. And, you are free to get materials/supplies from where ever you please.

Our forum is free and there is no requirement that you purchase anything. Users are free to share information. There are many startups that have benefited from the information offered by SkiBuilders.com.

You should have an easy way to donate or provide monies to your nonprofit to keep everything alive.

Rather than asking for / requiring funding from the users to cover professional hosting costs (this rarely goes down well and usually ends up with a lot of users quitting the site, especially if it becomes "2-tier" with regards to those who have donated and thosewho haven't), it's probably worth checking out what hosting is available free

Thanks for the comments regarding the donations, etc., and we'll consider these options.

On another note: I've been testing Word Press for the new site, and also the phpBB forum system. I like the phpBB forum system because of how flexible and portable it is. As you can see, we're currently using an older version of phpBB forum. But integrating phpBB with Word Press seems to be a challenge. I've tried wp-united, but can't seem to get it to work. The integration (uniform themes between the two) isn't necessary, but it would be nice to have the new site and the forum have the same look.

Any thoughts on this for those who have some experience?

I guess I could dig into the phpBB code and customize the theme to match our new site as much as possible, but it would be nice to use a nice plugin in WP.

Thanks for your input.

I could care less about the theme or style.

All I care about is that the massive amount of info on here doesn't get screwed up.

doughboy -- I'm confused by your comment. I understand you care about the information and data here. We all do too, so you're not alone. But with all this information, it would be nice to have it organized with some form of uniform 'style'. So in an effort to better organize, present, and deliver the content, I'm looking at options to better integrate the both the main site and the forum. Anyway, let me know if you have any constructive input.

Kam

I've tried integrating phpBB with other software (a few years back, mind), there's 2 major issues:

One is cross-software logins, which is a bugger to solve. Unlikely to be an issue for you if the "main site" is not publically writeable, and the few people with write access aren't worried about having double logins.

The other one is style, and you will *never* get a complete seamless integration - you're better off leaving phpBB with its default scheme (makes upgrading and security auditing much easier, for starts) and living with the fact it looks different. Otherwise, you write new skins for both sites using shared assets and colour schemes, but that doubles your effort in developing and testing.

In other words, I'm with dbs. Don't bother pishing about reskinning 2 sites in an effort to make them the same. Spend your time doing something more worthwhile, like - ummm - counting your collection of rare misthreaded inserts, or anything

Hi Simon,

Thanks for the input and pointing out the issues. I'm not a web developer by any stretch of the imagination so I threw out a query to see if any developers out there had some useful info.

In the past when I developed the site and forum, I didn't bother too much with the integration because at that time there wasn't a whole lot of plugins and tools available. I was hoping that there are some nice tools available now, but not really. WP has a few plugins for forums, and I've tested them and they seem descent, but I'd have to convert the exisiting DB over to be compatible with WP. I'm not willing to do this for fear of losing any information. Keeping the data intact is one of my main priorities.

Good integration would involve a lot of time and money. This is pretty much a DIY site and community, so in that spirit we'll try our best with this, but if anyone has any suggestions, please let me know.

Thanks again!

It shouldn't hurt just to upgrade the phpBB software. It says 2005 on this page. No upgrade since?

...and the DB? Upgrade?

I'm personally more towards a wiki solution. Mostly for organizations reasons. There are wikis with discussion features. If it's good, I don't know.

/Jan

first off i want to thank the Kams and Kevin for sticking with this site and making the move to the new server. if it weren't for you i wouldn't have such an awesome hobbie.

secondly i want to say i would support there being a way to donate to the site to help its up keep. i dont think there should be any advantage to donating just the satisfaction of knowing you are helping a community continue to grow and inspire the next generation of ski builders( and maybe some stickers while your at it :P)

finally i can not wait to see the new site with all the old faces and new skis

think snow

Nova

OAC >> It shouldn't hurt just to upgrade the phpBB software.

Agreed. But sometimes I don't like to make too many upgrades and changes unless we really need it, but I do agree that upgrading, e.g., to the new phpBB3, should be in order. Expect some changes to come!

Regarding Wiki -- I've long debated this. I'm hoping the new (hopefully) WP site will add some similar features.

novaskis -- thanks for your input. we'll consider the donate feature, but again, now that a SkiBuilders is a non-profit LLC, we'll support what we can personally and do what we can to pay the bills. I personally believe the non-profit approach better serves the mission and interest of the community.

Thanks again for all your input and support over the years -- it's exciting to see the interest, new startups, increase in knowledge, etc.

It's not just "should be in order", it's "100% necessary". You'll be wanting to upgrade your database at the same time too (although you probably won't get a choice if you're changing hosts anyway).

Before you do anything, back up your database. And make sure you can restore the data in a usable form onto another server.

Ease Simon, he's working on it!

My 2 cents... Stay w/ phpBB. Not that I'm partial to it or to another BB/forum software. I deal with database conversions all the time and there's always some kind of problem that requires manual intervention and it becomes a real PITA. I see no reason to give yourself a headache over it.

I'm a big believer in the KISS principle.

And I second Tuftys suggestion of backups and a test recovery.

Yes, I've started a beta site and when things are mature, I'll preview. I've been doing routine backups of the db. I do believe in keep good backups just in case.

Simon -- thanks for the offer. I may contact you via PM just to chat. Are you familiar with editing php.ini file? Our new host limits the size of the data file that can be uploaded and right now our db is about 75 MB so cannot be uloaded, so looks like I have to go monkey around. Anyway, it shouldn't be a problem.

I agree with the KISS principle, too, skidesmond and will try to keep things as simple as possible. Like I said, I do like phpBB so we'll stick with it.

Thanks again for the input and suggestions, guys! This is really help and thanks for your patience.

Glad to hear the site is headed for more stability.

I would echo the others and say that I dont care about a uniform theme between the site with your information on it and the forum. A functional, low glitz forum is sufficient. I would also contribute cash, as others have offered, if it would be accepted.

On WP, forums, wikis, etc.: Ive used WP for my blog for a long time now and I got sucked into trying to make the perfect theme a while ago. Im a software developer, but asm, C, and C# are really my domain. PHP was new to me, but simple enough to pickup, as were the Wordpress APIs. My goodness, what a time sink! You can tweak a WP theme seemingly indefinitely, and get lost in doing so. You can also make a theme which falls apart with future WP upgrades, which is really annoying. I was much happier when I went back to a standard theme.

Make sure you keep WP up to date it is commonly attacked, and there are frequent updates. If your host supports it, consider enabling automatic upgrades for minor versions. Otherwise, stay vigilant manually.

I used WP as a content management system for a while in addition to a blog. You can make WP do this, but honestly thats not what its for. Ive found that trying to use any of this stuff beyond its intended purpose, while possible, leads to a lot of extra work on your part. WP is an excellent blog system consider something else for static pages where you want to control the formatting.

My opinion is that Wordpress is good for blogs, a forum is good for discussion, and a wiki is good for more static/slow changing content, especially where public change history is desired or where public contribution is desired. Ive been pretty happy with MediaWiki so far for my own static pages even though I keep edits restricted. The wiki is pretty limited in terms of making the content pretty, though, so if you dont care about history then some other CMS would be better.

Beyond that, the most practical advice I want to give is this: make very, very sure we can get to the forum without hitting anything but the forum. I.e., make www.skibuilders.com/forum work. See if you can contact Reid, the admin at www.snowboardseattle.com and chat about his experience moving to a new forum and WP-based front-end, which they did recently after having a site that was pretty much unchanged for many years. It was awesome and fancy for a few months, then it all went to hell. The WP portion of the site got hacked and corrupted, and became an unwitting distributor of malware. Hes been unable to get it fixed up, and has temporarily given up and made their main site simply redirect right to the forum

Good luck!

You can add me to that list as well, more than willing to donate whatever is necessary.

Mike -- excellent summary, and I agree with you about the pros/cons. I've sunk some time recently working on a WP-based site for another project ----tweaking the look, and tweaking and tweaking and.... I'm concerned about the security issues as well. I've had my share of dealing with this problem, such as a few attempts to hack into our store. So if it's going to be WP, it'll be something simple for the main site.

Anyway, whatever we decide we'll consider the long-term impact. I don't want to lose any information or have to deal with major issues down the road.

Thanks again for your suggestions and feedback. I really appreciate them.

Also, thanks again to those who are willing to donate. We really appreciate it and we'll consider it an option in the near future.

Kam

I'm sorry. I just get a little wild sometimes when things don't move as quickly as I think they should. Thanks.

you just drink too much, but whateva.

Too each their own.

I'm starting to get used to you.

Is the new SB store up and running? I know it's separate from the forum/website now and I see the "Store" has been removed from the home page. Has it been announced yet?

makes no sense as to why you would ostracize or separate your most potential customer base by not promoting this site here but whatev,

http://www.blankslateskis.com/

Perhaps there is more to the story that we do not know? I suppose it's none of our business, as long as someone still has materials, and someone maintains the forum, I'm happy.

Dear all -- more updates.

1. FYI, official SkiBuilders.com posts will be made under the Administrator account, or clearly stated.

2. The SkiBuilders store has closed. SkiBuilders.com is now a non-profit LLC. Materials and supplies will be available through Blank Slate Skis (www.blankslateskis.com), owned and operated by Kelvin Wu. BigKam (Kam K.) has created The Ski Lab, LLC focusing on custom skis and on occasion offering materials and supplies (www.skilab.com). Both of these businesses are NOT affiliated with SkiBuilders.com LLC.

3. We are currently working on a new look for the main site, and will make the switch soon. We originally wanted to release it earlier, but was delayed due to our busy schedules.

4. Some of the earlier forum issues have been resolved on the server side (hopefully for good). We will be updating the forum's look soon as well, so stay tuned.

Thanks for your patience.

- SkiBuilders.com

It would be helpful if both websites were posted on the "Links" page. Thanks.

The links page has been updated with both new links: www.blankslateskis.com and www.skilab.com.

I guess we have all noticed the changes to the site, but it this the new site or are their new updates in the pipeline?

Perhaps it would be good to generate a few more sticky's, one's that highlight the various options for anyone who is new to the forum?

Tell new people to do more research is getting old.

Any chance we'll see a phpbb3 update soon? Or at least Tapatalk compatibility?