Next big site update

Well, the Xenforo 1.2 update is almost ready for prime time. I have been testing with the beta/rc builds and everything has been working out great. So my plan is to update the live site to the latest RC2 build.

I am thinking that I might do the update this Friday. I have the day off from work so I will have the time and I only have a couple of random things I need to sort out before the upgrade. I am hoping that I will have all the little details sorted out before Friday morning and would like to start the upgrade around 7:30am. I am hoping that everything goes as smooth as my test site and if so, the forums should be back up and running within 2 hours or so.

Most of the major XF improvements can be found in this thread.
http://xenforo.com/community/forums/have-you-seen/?prefix_id=30

I do suggest that you look through the forum since there are some pretty big improvements.

Responsive design, new editor, group banners, the ability to watch a whole forum, etc. There are some pretty nice front end features that will be added with this update.

So again, the plan is for this FRIDAY (7-26) around 7:30am.

I will be online before that making sure all the loose ends are tied up before the upgrade. I will give everyone the warning before I shut down. Hopefully if everything goes as planned, the site should be back up and running in less than 2 hours.

Thanks
Russ

 

Ok, just some updates.

XF1.2 has been installed. All of our add-ons have been updated and upgraded. So I am down to my final 2 issues.

Tapatalk. It has some issues and there are work arounds. It is something that I will get finished today, I just want to get a few other items sorted first.

Theme stuff. This is going to take some time and there is going to be periods of weird stuff showing up. I am currently getting the light theme updated with all the latest and greatest features and getting everything put back to where it belongs. Then I will jump into the dark themes which didn't seem to have any real issues.

So as of now, I just have some visual items to take care of and get tapatalk up and running again. I should have all of it taken care of in a few hours. Once I have everything done, I will come back in and update this thread.

As always, if you see any problems, errors, or things that just don't work, please let me know. This is a Xenforo RC release, so there could still be a random issues or two that might pop up, but since the release on Tuesday they have only had 1 bug report.

Thanks
Russ

 

Ok, I am I am kinda done.

Tapatalk is half assed done. Tapatalk is waiting on the final version of XF before they release their complete version. So they released a fix that I had to hack and slash into their update package to make it work. Everything that I checked on my end works. So don't be overly surprised if something throws a random error on you. Tapatalk knows the current problem and will release the integrated fixed when XF releases 1.2 stable. Until then, this is what we have.

Themes. I think I got everything back to where it was before. Currently my eyes are bugging out from working on the site for the past 5 hours and I don't see anything out of place. So I am going to call it done for now, but there are still changes/improvements that I will be making.

Lastly, all the new features that were added with the 1.2 update are live. The biggest thing that will effect everyone is the responsive design. Here is a XF bit on how it works.

In order to better support smaller-screen devices such as mobile phones and tablets, XenForo 1.2 will be introducing a responsive version of the default design.

What is responsive design? At the simplest level, it allows you to specify CSS that applies only if the screen width is below a certain level. This allows the design to be significantly altered to fit smaller screens. For example, tabular or horizontally-focused designs don't work well when you only have a screen that's 320px wide (an iPhone).

So, what options will XenForo provide?



Here you can see that we provide 3 "inflection points". In general, they correspond to particular classes of devices.

• Narrow (max width: 480px): phones vertical, some phones horizontal
• Medium (max width: 600px): some phones horizontal, 7" tablets vertical
• Wide (max width: 800px): 7" tablets horizontal, 10" tablets vertical

You can also disable the responsive design entirely. Specific pages can also opt out of the responsive design with a <xen:container /> line.

For add-on developers, many of your pages will automatically support the responsive design well. It really depends how much "default" CSS you are using. If you are creating multi-column layouts (such as some resource manager pages), you will need to write custom responsive versions. However, if you're just using standard systems like tabs and forms, you will automatically inherit the responsive changes.

The extent of changes on a page will really vary based on the width of a device. For example, "wide devices" (601-800px by default) will see mostly similar pages, but things like sidebars will be moved if needed.

 

Another site update.

XF 1.2 has gone to a stable release. I will be testing it on my test site the rest of the week to make sure everything is ok. IF everything works out, I plan on updating the live site this weekend (8-10 or 8-11). There is a outside chance I might have to work on Sat and if that is the case, I will do the update on Sunday. Otherwise the update will take place Saturday morning.

Also, Linode has given our servers more storage room. To access this room, I will need to shut down both servers, do the upgrade, then restart the servers. I have already done it on my test site and it take about 10-15 minutes to complete. With that said, I also plan on getting those updates taken care of when I do the site update.

So, if my schedule stays as is, Saturday morning (8-10), I am going to take the site offline for about 2 hours. I will be updating the servers and doing a Xenforo update to the latest stable build. I also have a few add-ons that will also need to be updated with the XF update.

Cliffs?
Site update on Sat.
site will be offline for 2 hours
Probably shut it down around 7-7:30am

Russ

 

Just a bit of a update on this mornings downtime.

We are now running Xenforo 1.2 stable. Not much has really changed since the RC update I installed a couple of weeks ago, but this is now the considered the XF stable release. I have also updated all of our add-ons (about 15) to the most current versions. Here is a link to all the new features now in Xenforo 1.2.
http://xenforo.com/community/forums/have-you-seen/?prefix_id=30

Along with this mornings downtime, I also did a couple of server side updates. Linode has doubled our storage on each server to 48gb. So to take advantage of the increased disk space, I needed to shut down the servers, resize each disk, then reboot. These starts are for each server and MNSubru is currently running 2 (web side and database).

Here is our current server stats (original stats)
1GB of ram (256MB)
48GB of storage (10GB)
2TB of transfer (500MB)
and we now have access to 8 cpu cores

Now with everything up to date, it will be on to the next items on my list.

Google/vendor ads.
Unfortunately, we do need to place ads to make sure the site and community stays alive. Like last years donation meter we only made it half way. What that means is that some of the ad money that MNS generates has to go to paying the bills instead of supporting events and prizes (like our kick ass GoPro camera at LAX).

Now with the new responsive design of XF, we can tailor the ad space to YOUR screen width. As of now, the ads that get delivered are a strict size and based on your screen size they will look all out of place. With the responsive design, the ads will be selected on screen size so they do not overlap items on the site. Along with the change in ad sizes I will also be implementing the asynchronous ad code. With the asynchronous ad code, you can set the size of the ad code directly via Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), which allows you to dynamically specify the size of the ad that will be served.

Site themes/visuals
Well, MNSubaru has pretty much looked the same since we rolled out Xenforo. While I have heard very few complaints, there are some things I will like to change and add. Some colors need to be changed, corners need to be rounded, etc. Now the XF 1.2 has been released, more people will start working on custom items that I can roll into the site. As I get these items taken care of, if they are big improvements, I will create/update a thread for them.

So, if you see anything out of place, something that doesn't work, or whatever, please let me know. If there are changes to any of the themes that you would like to see changed, please let me know.

Russ