Developments

In preparation for my 12-month backpacking trip around the world, I have set up a new site called Jaza's World Trip. The site hasn't got much content on it yet, but as I embark upon my travels, I will be regularly adding blog entries and other things to it.

After running on its own separate (and oftentimes outdated) codebase for almost a year, the Category Module web site is now sharing the GreenAsh codebase in a multisite setup! This means that from now on, whenever the GreenAsh Drupal codebase is updated, those updates will be reflected on the category module site.

For the first time in almost 2 years, a major upgrade of the site has been completed. GreenAsh has now been switched from Drupal 4.5 to Drupal 4.7. A number of important changes have been made, including the design of a new theme, and the use of new 4.7-only Drupal modules, such as the views module and the category module. Read about the details of how it was done in the thoughts archive.

User registration and user commenting have been temporarily disabled site-wide. This means that at present, no new users are being accepted, and all pages on the site are restricted to read-only access. This has been done because we are currently in the process of performing a major upgrade on the site. All services will be restored once the upgrade has been completed.

The long-awaited Drupal 4.6 has finally been released. GreenAsh will soon be making the migration to this new platform, from our current 4.5 code base. We'll also be using Drupal's new multisite functionality to migrate other GreenAsh sites to Drupal, and to integrate them with GreenAsh using features such as shared user accounts.

Today has been a busy day here at GreenAsh. As well as some other (smaller) changes, we've implemented a new module that allows us to create "real" pages for our various sections. So now, for the first time, you can comment on our sections, you can view printer-friendly versions of them, and you can do anything else that was previously possible only for real pages, such as posts.

GreenAsh has made the transition from NSW Daylight Savings time to regular NSW time smoothly and without any hitches. To celebrate our automated Daylight Savings system being fully tested in real-life for the first time, we are releasing the code for it under the terms of the GPL.

At 12:30pm today, the hit counters for every piece of content site-wide were reset to 1. This was done because search engine bots were inflating the numbers on these counters, and hence they were becoming ineffective at providing useful statistical information. Measures have now been put in place to stop these bots from affecting the site's counters.

The new version of the GreenAsh web site - powered by the Drupal content management system - was launched today. Read about the enormous changes that have been made, the benefits of switching to Drupal, and some of the updates that you can expect to see here in the near future.

The development of GreenAsh's online forum system is now complete, and can be accessed by going to the forums section. We ask that you post any queries - technical, sales-related, or otherwise - in the relevant forum, and that you check the forums regularly as you would the site news.