The New Look
A few weeks ago it appeared that someone tried to gain access to my account here. That led me to do some checking up on the security. One thing about WordPress I didn’t like when I installed it was that it didn’t give you an option to change your login name from admin. What’s the point of having a separate login and display name if everyone knows that the login name for the admin account is admin? I quickly remedied that situation only to find out that Simple:Press, the forum software I was using, was even worse about it. The link to your profile page actually used your login name instead of your display name!
It was at that point I went to the Simple:Press forums only to find out that without warning they had started to charge for access to the forums. I found this to be pretty ridiculous. Their forum still feels not quite finished and they have flat out refused to include some basic functions that other forums have because it doesn’t fit their ideas and they want people to pay money for that? Having never been very satisfied with Simple:Press to begin with, this was the last straw.
I could have gone back to vBulletin, but the version I have is pretty old at this point and I’m not sure how secure it is or if the next php or mysql update will finally kill it. Instead I decided to go back to phpBB. There were a couple of problems with that. The first being that I would have to figure out how to transfer the members and posts from Simple:Press to phpBB and there is no convertor. (I’ll talk about that in another post.) The second being that I certainly didn’t want to use the default theme and not have the forum match my website.
That led me to decide to go ahead and overhaul the look of the website. I just wasn’t happy enough with the old theme and probably a little bored of it as well. It took longer than I anticipated to get it done, but here it is.
I suppose there was a third problem with switching to phpBB. There is not currently a way to integrate the users. I’m going to be working on that, but in the meantime, registration will be handled by phpBB and there will be no login for the main part of the website. If someone wants to make a comment to a posted article, they do not need to be a registered member of the website to do so.
If you notice any problems or have any issues with the redesign, please let me know.
