EduGeek Site Upgrade News

It’s finally here…almost!

This is a little heads-up to let you all know that (fingers crossed) we shall be upgrading EduGeek to a whole new platform in the very near future.

We will be moving away from our current (and quite long in the tooth) vBulletin 4 platform to a whole new shiny Invision Power Suite 4.x (IPS) based site which will allow us to offer you a whole new bunch of modern features and plug-ins.

Why are we moving?

As some of you may be aware, our current platform is, in internet terms, quite old and support from vBulletin and third party plug-in providers is now almost non-existent, making security patching and the ability to integrate new and upcoming internet technologies a constant challenge with us often having to write our own workarounds.

So, we decided way back in 2012 to move to a new platform and IPS seemed to fit the bill nicely, with an integrated store (yes, we shall be selling merchandise finally!), working CMS and other options previously only available from third parties all provided via Invision, negating the past problem in vBulletin of plugins not working correctly when the main site had an update and plugin devs not updating their products.

Once we’d made Invision our choice of new platform they then announced that they were to launch IPS 4 the very next year and we decided to wait for the new platform to save migrating then upgrading shortly after.

This didn’t happen, and we had to wait until 2015 to finally see it. Unfortunately, they then didn’t release the migration tool which would allow us to move from VB to IPS until late last year and even then it was a very buggy beta. This coupled with glitches in the main site suite itself

All of this meant we had to wait until now before we were confident we can move. And here we, almost, finally are.

What will the new site look like?

This is going to be a tough one to answer as we shall need to ensure that everything works correctly during the course of the migration and we’ve never done it with the live site before (for obvious reasons!).

What we can say, and please be prepared for, is that whilst we are going to take every step we can to make the new site look as familiar as possible, it is a completely different platform and some things may not be where you expected them to be such as forum post controls and links.

Please be patient as we are sure that you will find the extra features we are to bring in more than worth the slight inconvenience of having to learn your way around.

To hopefully provide you with answers to any questions you might have, we have made up a list of PAQ's (possibly asked questions )

Migration PAQ’s:

Q. How long will EduGeek be down for when we migrate?

A. Hopefully about 48 hours. It is planned that we shall take the site down at some point during a weekend (from a Friday evening) and should be up and running by Sunday evening all being well

Q. Will you keep us informed about how the migration goes?

A. Yes, we shall have a shoutbox in place as well as our usual Twitter feed and we may even have some fun things to look at as we do it live as well!

Q. Will there be any new features added to the new EduGeek?

A. Hell yes! It is one of the reasons we are moving. Some of the things you can expect to see on the new site are:

• Dedicated news section/feeds
  
• Member articles
  
• Reviews
  
• Wiki
  
• Dedicated jobs section
  
• Competitions
  
• Merchandise store
  
• Video feeds
  
• Webcasts
  
• Vendor directory
  
• Small vendor areas
  
• Sponsors areas
  
• White paper hosting
  
• Newsletters
  

+Others!

Q. Will all of these new features be available when the migration is complete?

A. Some of these will be live when EduGeek comes back on line and some will be introduced gradually once we are happy that all is well, the platform is stable and they work as advertised

Q. Can I help with any areas on the new site?

A. Yes! We will have quite a few areas where we shall need help. These will include things like:

• Writing articles
  
• Reviewers
  
• Working on a news letter
  
• New site areas moderation
  

We shall be putting a shout out for volunteers once we figure out just what will be required and when

Q. Will there be any kind of help on offer to find my way around the new platform?

A. Yes, we shall be creating a dedicated forum for this and hopefully you will find your way around in no time at all

And that’s it for now. We shall let you know the exact dates for the migration in due course and we are sure you will find the new EduGeek a lot more acessible and expansive than our current system.