<div class="header">## Office of the Seneschal Report

April 3, 2011

</div> <div class="divider">### News </div>

We Have An Updated World

If you haven't been living under a rock, you may have noticed a few things:

New Forums

I've been sketched out by our old forum software for quite a while. We had been running Invision Power Boards (IPB) since 2005...from source code that old which made me shart every time I thought of it. Super old code is disconcerting and puts us in a bad spot. Because IPB is a for-pay product and the DJB doesn't have an income, switching to an Open Source (read: free) product was the right plan. phpBB3 was the answer as its feature sets match (and exceed) those of the version of IPB we were running.

The conversion wasn't overly difficult and I was able to preserve all of our content. To make the upgrade happen, it had to follow this path: IPB to phpBB2, then phpBB2 to phpBB3. phpBB2 did not support nested forums, so getting things back to the way we were took about 3 hours of manual relocation of forums back into the original hierarchy.

Lastly, I created a theme for the forums that matched the site's overall look and feel.

Faster Wiki and Forums

In addition to updating the forum, I moved it from the DJB server (a Windows server where PHP code takes an extra second to execute no matter how simple the page) to my own (a Unix server that plays nicely with PHP). I did the same for the Wiki and things are flipping snappy!

Optimized Images

Wow. We have about 6,000 image files between robes, sabers, and warbanners. I spent a good 6 hours last night downloading, optimizing, changing a lot of .gifs to .pngs, re-uploading, then writing scripts to update the database to reflect different file types. When optimizing, most sabers and robe file sizes were twice as large as they needed to be!! That was boatloads of fun and excitement...but I was able to shave off over 50 MB of extraneous data. That should help with load times!

To optimize the files, I used Yahoo's Smush It tool. If any of you do graphics for the web, use this tool.. I've asked the Herald staff and Muz to use it as well.

Development

Possession System

I'm working on the Possession system still. I'm re-designing the UI at the moment. Because the wiki and the forum move to my server has worked better than expected, the new possessions code will be run from the same server. I'm working out the kinks with that at the moment as well because we want a seamless experience.

Robe Administration

I've created a UI so that the Herald Staff can upload robes and attach them to dossiers much more easily.

Bug Fixes

And, of course, I've been doing a lot of bug fixes. Fremoc is the reigning champion in bug reports.

<div class="divider">### Closing Remarks </div>

I'm now one of the cool kids with a Formspring account so people can ask me questions if they desire. You can do so here.

Thank you. That is all. Bork, bork, bork!