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Integration/SSO


DZComposer

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I feel that there is a disconnect between the site and the community. The only thing that ties them together is a dual hyperlink. There is no integration at all. Articles on the site are not visible from the forums, and trending forum topics are not available on the site.

I consider SFO to be a community-based fansite, and this kind of disconnect does not jive with my vision on what SFO should be.

The people that make IPB also make a pretty nice CMS as well, and I am considering moving the site to that. Unfortunately, it does not look like there is a way to migrate all of the site content in one fell swoop like there was with the forum switch, so site content would be temporarily stunted.

The advantages of the switch are Single-Sign-On for all of SFO, assuming I buy the gallery component, and a more integrated feel between the site. You can comment on articles on the site, staff can promote threads to articles, and other things that allow the community of SFO spread to the site as well.

The problem is the way our subdomains are mapped-out. If I do this, it is likely a lot of things will change in terms of URLs used to access parts of the site. Also if I do this, I will need help moving the current articles and pages or else the migration will take too long.

I still need to work out the logistics, so I am not doing this yet, but I feel that you guys should know what I am planning.

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I am behind you everystep of the way. If you ever need assistance or anything at all. I would be more then happy to help

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Whatever you feel is best DZ ^_^ , thanks for getting the news out too.

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I support this integration.

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Making an already awesome site even more awesome is good in my book! :3

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I usually get a bit…annoyed with forum/site integration, but for SFO I think it will be great. :)

Especially when you're the one planning it, DZ. ^^

If you need anything I'd be glad to help with anything.

And yeah, I support this too.

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As long as it's not totally frustrating for you to do it, sounds good to me.

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It won't be. I want to avoid that. The longest I want the downtime to be is a couple of days. It would be total downtime, though, as I would likely have to move the forum installation to a new directory (IP.Content uses a lot of IP.Board's code).

I can't set up a test environment, so it would have to be done on the live site, but I will only do this when I have the time to sit down and actually get all features up, and a start on the content. This is where help from you guys would be great. I would give you access to get the HTML code of the Wordpress pages, and write access on the new system until the content is moved. Of course there would be some qualifications before I give such access. I don't believe in taking sites down for weeks/months for software moves. And it shows. So far every move SFO has made has had minimal downtime with functionality restored in a matter of hours, not days. Final tweaking can take weeks, but making it usable quickly is priority one.

I would write a migration too, but I figure the time to develop, write, and debug such a tool would take at least as much time as manually moving things.

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Yeah, I'd like this. Being able to have a forum discussion on an article, rather than having to "@ Username" to reply would be cool. I'd also like to be able to watch comment sections on articles, rather than bookmarking.

I would help, but I have almost no knowledge of HTML code, or any other code for that matter. I'm a techie, but I haven't had time to learn HTML, C sharp, or any of those newfangled visual languages.:lol:

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Helpers wouldn't have to write any code.

All you'd have to do is copy what is there and paste it into a file. Then, when the new system is up, create a new page/article and paste it in there.

I haven't checked the Wordpress addons yet, so this may not be necessary if it turns out that I an export the articles as HTML files.

For the record, we have 109 pages and 304 articles as of this post. That's a lot of copying and pasting for one person to do.

A lot of the older articles I probably won't move. Why move an old fanstuff article from 2 years ago?

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Making an already awesome site even more awesome is good in my book! :3

what he said. go through with the integration; DZ. It's a good move on your part.

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IP.Content and IP.Gallery licenses purchased. I am working on the back-end getting ready.

Here is what is going to happen:

Forum installation will move to the main site's URL: http://www.starfox-online.net. IP.Content will be what you land on when you hit that.

forums.starfox-online.net will become a redirect subdomain, directing to the forum index page. That won't mean much to you guys as end-users, other than URLs will possible change to www.starfox-online.net URLs as you NAV the forums, but your forums.starfox-online.net bookmarks won't break.

I may not need help with moving pages afterall. I decided to prune all articles pre-2010. There is now a managable number of them.

Game pages will be re-done entirely, so saving them line-by-line won't be necessary. Wordpress can output an XML file with all of the posts and pages code.

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That explains why my Chrome link in my most visited page when wonky for a second there. The redirect was a little weird, said the link was actually broken, and didn't direct to anywhere on the site, but I could click on the link that goes to the main page to get back.

If that made any sense.

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I ran into some redirect issues during the move. They should be fixed now.

BTW, if your bookmarks lead to forums.starfox-online.net/forums, you will land on a 404 page. If your bookmarks lead to forums.starfox-online.net, you should be fine.

Now the fun part: Configuring all this new stuff.

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Sounds complicated, but I think it would be good for the site, as I for one rarely ever go to the main page at all anymore, so merging them might make me look at the main site more often.

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You should now see "Articles and Pages" on the top menu. This is the "main site." I removed the Shoutbox link because it is redundant. Clicking on the title of the shoutbox takes you to the same place.

It will take me a while to get it exactly how I want it, but IPContent is very configurable, so in time it will look very nice.

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Didn't we agree that that was to be disabled?

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Forgive my n00bishness...but I just found the site last night and was browsing around it...then it all changed on me. But I was wondering if all the music/sound files were going to be moved/are still listed somewhere? I went looking for them, as I really enjoyed listening to them last night, but I am lost.

Otherwise, I think this is great. Even just coming onto the site last night, I was a bit confused what was what because it did seem very separate and disjointed. This change is fixing that quickly! Great work!

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