Hi All

It has been over a year since I formally took over supoprting FODFHT. There have been various distractions and I have been doing some planning and testing of options to replace the base software of FODFHT.

There is increasing urgency for this as the Joomla version we use is no longer supported. Upgrading Joomla would change many of the ways in which the site is constructed. Some of the pages are already not working as expected. I propose to replace Joomla with Wordpress.

Some of the key features of FODFHT are provided by other software, including this Forum, the photo Gallery and the key searches of our databases.

My plan is therefore to have 3 stages:

1: To build the new site using wordpress and accessing all the existing software. I would be grateful to have some people helping to test that once it is sufficiently advanced.
2: To allow the sites to run in parallel (there may be some dangers in this!) and invite wider testing, especially on the content and look and feel.
3: to go live with the new site and close the old one.

I would welcome any initial thoughts from anyone, either about what you value in the existing site and what you would like to see restored (we have lost some aspects) or what might be improved or added..

For the moment my intention is:

• To retain the overall look and feel but to revise the navigation to be a little easier.
  
• To remove the need to register simply to access the databases. These will be freely searchable (provided that there can be sufficient security to prevent mass download). It will, of course, be necessary, to register for the Forum so that access and email replies etc can operate.
  

All comments welcome. I hope the new site will be available for stage 1 testing in between 4 to 6 weeks time.

Regards

Paul

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Admin 2