Singletrack Staff Blog

Some lucky people got a sneak preview of SingletrackWorld II today which has naturally fuelled a bit of speculation about it so I’ll try to explain what we’re doing and where we’re up to.

The current site was developed before the paper magazine launched. It uses what are now very out of date versions of phpWebsite and Phorum. The integration between the forum and the rest of the site has never been very good and in general the site had accumulated so much cruft behind the scenes that it was damn near impossible to make improvements.

We’ve been talking about a new version of the site for at least three years (I think: I don’t want to check - it’d just depress me…) and have had at least two abortive attempts at producing Singletrack II already. The main problem has been that when you have something that thousands of people love and would be happy to use if only it were a bit more reliable you really want to keep the user interface pretty much the same. “The same only better” is a surprisingly tough brief.

The new version of the site is based on Joomla 1.5 with quite a bit of custom code to do Singletrack specific things. Jooma 1.5 is itself still in beta and we’re merging in changes to the Joomla code on a daily basis.

The most popular part of the current site (and also the reason why the server dies so often) is the forum. The new forum code is being written from scratch. I’ve set myself the target of being able to handle ten times the traffic of the current forum just to give us a bit more room for growth. The new forum will also provide the comments facility on stories - in effect each news story will get a mini forum attached to it. One of the nasty things about the current site is that the mechanism for commenting on a story differs in all sorts of ways from posting on the forum.

Notoriously the new site has been ‘weeks away’ more than once in the past. I’m a software guy so it’s generally pretty futile asking me how long something’s going to take. In spite of having done this stuff for more than twenty five years I still can’t really be sure how much I’m going to get done by the end of the afternoon - so asking me for a long term prediction is just a waste of valuable time. If you don’t have experience of software peoples’ ability to stay on schedule think builder and then treble it.

In spite of that the new site is now substantially done. It still needs quite a few cosmetic changes but they won’t take long. The main thing still to complete is the forum. I’ve been buggering about with that for weeks - much to the frustration of everyone in the office - but it really does need to be just so if it’s going to handle the onslaught of all that, er, informed debate.

Anyway, I suppose I’d better get back to work. I’ll post updates here when there’s anything interesting to report - culminating I hope in a triumphant “it’s done” in a few weeks. Thanks for your patience.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 2nd, 2007 at 7:10 pm and is filed under SingletrackWorld II . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.