GWJ migration to Drupal 7: Site launch notes

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After an absurdly long beta period in which I sometimes worked on the site, but mainly looked at it longingly while I pulled into work responsibilities, I’m incredibly excited to finally be launching our Drupal 7-based upgrade to the site. This wouldn't have been possible without Fredrik_S's design direction and Certis's guidance (and patience... mostly patience).

There’s a bunch of stuff you’re probably interested in knowing about the upgrade and migration, so let’s get right to it. I'll keep this thread updated with additional notes throughout the weekend.

Add your bug reports and feedback here!
If you run into issues or have feedback, please comment on this thread. We ask that you allow some time for the new design to sink in before providing design / cosmetic feedback. However, we definitely want to hear about things that are broken or missing.

Update your profile.
We’ve made a bunch of cool changes to how profiles work, so make sure you update your settings.

  • Update social account profile (Steam, Twitter, XBL, etc.) Everyone can finally stop using all of their signature space to list links to their accounts on various gaming services!
  • We’ve added the ability to get notifications on threads. Configure your notification settings. Don’t worry, they’re off by default.
  • Any new private messages should now threaded. As a result, it may look like you have fewer PMs, but they should all be there!
  • Your tracker and favorites will indicate you have a lot of unread posts. I was unable to migrate the read history in a comprehensible manner, so the “# new” count on posts will be updated as your read them.
  • \[size\] tags don’t work anymore. You’ll need to express the volume of your voice using other creative means.
  • Just generally double check your profile. Explore the new settings, etc.
  • Your favorites may have not all migrated successfully for unknown reasons. I believe we got most of them, but apologies if any got left behind.
  • Drupal 5 allowed some funky characters in user names that Drupal 7 doesn’t allow. If you get warnings about this when editing your profile, you may need to alter your username a bit.

We’ve got some new and changed features.

  • Security! The entire site now runs over SSL.
  • You can add hero images to forum topics!
  • Tags have been removed. They were an interesting experiment, but data showed they weren’t heavily used. If you liked them and found them useful, let us know how you were using them so we may better understand how to implement them.
  • You can now report content and users by clicking the flag icon on a post, or the “report this user” link on an account profile.
  • All the URLs for migrated content have changed, but the old URLs should still work and redirect to the new location as expected.

Known issues or features that may change.

  • Comment notifications are fairly untested due to the nature of running a dev site in which you don’t want to flood users with email. Depending on how it works out, and the volume of messages we end up sending, we may need to turn these off. For now, they’re on.
  • Private message read statuses may be funky. I tried to figure this one out, but it broke my brain. Just mark a message as read if it’s inaccurate!

Future stuff.
I don’t want to make any promises about immediate functionality, but I would like to say that a key focus of this migration has been to improve stability and overall performance. Performance plans go out the window when you launch a site, though, so if the site gets sluggish, or we start having functional issues, those will be the first tasks I tackle. We’ve also moved to a new host. I’m hopeful that the move will result in more stable performance, and take the burden of sysop-type stuff off my plate.

If you’d like to know more intricate details on the upgrade, I’ll probably do a write-up sometime in the next week or two.

Bug fixes
Running log of fixed bugs over the weekend.

  • Fixed YouTube videos not rendering due to mixed connection mode.
  • Fixed drop down menu link to private messages throwing access denied without a redirect to /messages.
  • Fixed and re-ran the user profile picture migration.
  • Fixed Google Fonts not using secure URLs.

Known issues with fixes being worked on

  • Site search is broken. This is due to Googles CSE widget library assuming http connection.

Comments

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None of this happens without Jeff Beeman. Thanks Jeff! Also big thanks to Fredrik Skarstedt for all his amazing work on the art and turning my mad ramblings into something coherent.

Lots more to go, thanks for bearing with us!

It looks like everyone's avatars reset by a few months. And any links directly to user pages are busted since it looks like user numbers have had a 10 appended to the beginning. Not a big deal.

It's going to take awhile to get used to the redesign, but it looks good so far!

Many many MANY! thanks to Jeff and Fredrik for all the blood, sweat and tear that went into this!

Yeah, now I have to hunt for my most recent avatar. That said, cool! Going exploring through the new sight next.

No Nintendo Network ID in the External Services. Or 3DS system code.

Somehow I ended up with other people's service IDs. DB weirdness?

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/PuVfqdtl.png)

edit: I get an error whenever I try to update my service IDs.

Temporarily Unavailable
The website that you're trying to reach is having technical difficulties and is currently unavailable.

We are aware of the issue and are working hard to fix it. Thank you for your patience.

Looking good. Will have to check out all the new profile coolness when I'm back at my PC. Nice layout on mobile though.

Really looking forward to exploring! Thanks for all the effort.

Stele wrote:

No Nintendo Network ID in the External Services. Or 3DS system code.

Clearly another "Nintendo isn't for Gamers (with Jobs)" conspiracy!?!?

Looking but don't see a way to see all a list of my followed topics anymore (used to be a small bit of text on the left side of the main screen after you login.

Cayne wrote:

Looking but don't see a way to see all a list of my followed topics anymore (used to be a small bit of text on the left side of the main screen after you login.

Yeah you either have to click on my account and then click on recent activity. Or if you mouse over my account, there's a favorites link, but not a recent activity link. So you could click on favorites and then still click on recent activity.

Looks great!

No iOS GameCenterID listed under external services also.

I can't get to my inbox, it's just saying unauthorised when I click the link from the drop down menu at the top. I pm'ed myself by using the 'Message this user' link under my own avatar, and it said that message sent successfully.

Update: I can get in if I hit the 'messages' tab that comes up when you compose a message to someone.

No link to tracker anywhere on any of the pages anymore so you have to navigate there directly. Button is over some text too.

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/XlBoHhK.png)

edit:

Mermaidpirate wrote:

I can't get to my inbox, it's just saying unauthorised when I click the link from the drop down menu at the top. I pm'ed myself by using the 'Message this user' link under my own avatar, and it said that message sent successfully.

Ditto.

So far I'm liking the design! I don't remember it being quite this snazzy in the beta.

This looks really nice.

Stele wrote:
Cayne wrote:

Looking but don't see a way to see all a list of my followed topics anymore (used to be a small bit of text on the left side of the main screen after you login.

Yeah you either have to click on my account and then click on recent activity. Or if you mouse over my account, there's a favorites link, but not a recent activity link. So you could click on favorites and then still click on recent activity.

Yeah, I was just noticing that too. Is there anyways we can get a "Recent Activity" link on the main page or toolbar? I know it's a bit silly to complain about that since it's technically only two clicks away now, but I use that link to browse the forums about 95% of the time. It would be awesome to have it on the main page if that's not difficult to do.

Few more things found.

  • https YouTube video no longer work like on the old site. Example
  • Formatting no longer works in location (see mine for example).

Can't wait to keep using it more. Hopefully the old bookshelf pages made the transition.

Dyni wrote:

This looks really nice.

Stele wrote:
Cayne wrote:

Looking but don't see a way to see all a list of my followed topics anymore (used to be a small bit of text on the left side of the main screen after you login.

Yeah you either have to click on my account and then click on recent activity. Or if you mouse over my account, there's a favorites link, but not a recent activity link. So you could click on favorites and then still click on recent activity.

Yeah, I was just noticing that too. Is there anyways we can get a "Recent Activity" link on the main page or toolbar? I know it's a bit silly to complain about that since it's technically only two clicks away now, but I use that link to browse the forums about 95% of the time. It would be awesome to have it on the main page if that's not difficult to do.

At the very least, it should be in the links when you mouse over "my account" (with inbox, favorites, etc.), so you would just have to click once.

Wow, I had no idea the old site was Drupal. I've heard about the difficulties of site migrations with Drupal.

You guys know Drupal 8 is going to be out soon, right? Anyone? Anyone? I'll show myself to the door.

In all seriousness, it looks great and seems to be functioning well. Back pats all around

YouTube embeds aren't getting the https URLs for their iframes, keeping them from being displayed in IE by default, and Firefox and Chrome at all.

Sooooooo many bright red lines! My eyes! But you don't really need them any more since you restored the alternating light gray/medium gray post colors. And surely the signature delimiter line doesn't need to be the same red, too. Can you at least desaturate all of these lines?

Also, the ultra-ultra-ultra-thin red font for the usernames makes it by far the most difficult element to scan. Surely the poster's name, of all message elements, would be deserving of a higher font weight?

Edwin wrote:

No link to tracker anywhere on any of the pages anymore so you have to navigate there directly. Button is over some text too.

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/XlBoHhK.png)

How did you get to those options? I can go to "my recent content", but I can't find a link to get to "all recent content".

Kurrelgyre wrote:

YouTube embeds aren't getting the https URLs for their iframes, keeping them from being displayed in IE by default, and Firefox and Chrome at all.

Need to look at the code, as real life has kicked my ass the last month or so, but we had this problem at work, and it was as simple as changing "http://" to "//" in the code, which should use "http://" if you're on HTTP, and "https://" if you're using HTTPS.

Also, looks great. Good job, everyone.

Liking it so far. I especially like being able to mark a thread as a favorite or not from the list of threads, at least in the favorites list. I didn't see a way to mark a thread a favorite from within the thread, though.

Dyni wrote:
Edwin wrote:

No link to tracker anywhere on any of the pages anymore so you have to navigate there directly. Button is over some text too.

How did you get to those options? I can go to "my recent content", but I can't find a link to get to "all recent content".

https://www.gamerswithjobs.com/tracker

Let's test if all my favourite old smilies work:

I feel like I owe royalties to m0nk3boy for using XD

Also, suggestion, put "report this user" further away from "send private message" on a user's page, to make it harder to accidentally press the wrong one.

Keep up the great work!

muraii wrote:

Liking it so far. I especially like being able to mark a thread as a favorite or not from the list of threads, at least in the favorites list. I didn't see a way to mark a thread a favorite from within the thread, though.

Very top of a given thread, do you see a tab there?

Thanks for all the hard work!

I do miss favorites...or am I just not seeing it?

Edwin wrote:
Dyni wrote:
Edwin wrote:

No link to tracker anywhere on any of the pages anymore so you have to navigate there directly. Button is over some text too.

How did you get to those options? I can go to "my recent content", but I can't find a link to get to "all recent content".

https://www.gamerswithjobs.com/tracker

Ok great, thanks. I'll just bookmark that for now and shut up

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