Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog

There’s a new version now up. For non-purchasers of Behold, Behold had only 4 days left until it expired. So I needed to release a new version, even though all it has new is 2 small bug fixes.

I didn’t realize until now how long this site redevelopment has been taking. It’s now two months and still isn’t finished. But that’s because I’m tacking everything on: A new website. A new web host. A new blog tool. New forum software. New mailing software. New automation scripts. In the meantime, other than new software, I’ve also learned the PHP script language, mySQL database, and CSS web markup. So I’ve been busy and my head hurts.

I’ve come to realize that it was necessary to do this prior to getting to beta and then version 1.0. Soon my site will be ready for growth and increased traffic. Will that happen? I hope so, but at least I’ll have a nice modern site with all the tools in place to handle it if and when it does.

So with all decisions in place, it’s just a matter of implementing everything, bit by bit, until it’s done. My current Behold website uses 8 year old HTML/ASP/Access technology that lasted up to now. This rewrite will bring my site into the new CSS/PHP/mySQL world, and should hopefully last me for 8 more years.

Yes, I had planned on going to Simple Forum. I’m still very impressed by it. But, I wanted to customize it to my site and change not only the appearance (which can easily be done through CSS), but also the content of what is included and where.

Unfortunately, although the PHP code is all available, it is very tightly written and is not easy to change. I’d have to be very much an expert at PHP to do it properly. And such custom modifications would make it very difficult to upgrade to future versions. I wouldn’t want to get stuck at the current version.

So we hereby redeclare the winner to be bbPress. Works just like WordPress. It can also be easily extended by plugins, but more importantly almost all of it is easily customizable. I should be able to add some really useful features, such as showing you the topics you started and all the topics you participated in.

I commented last entry that bbPress was “primitive”. Well, yes it is. But it is just starting to take off, and people are really getting excited about it and starting to turn it around. And as far as handling large forums goes, just check out the Wordpress Support Forum which has well over 600,000 posts already. It uses bbPress.

The one intangible I really like about it is that I can have it in its own directory called “forum”, rather than under the blog directory as “blog/forum” or as a strange url such as “blog/?page_id=6″ as Simple Forum requires since it is a plugin under WordPress. People on Unix boxes can use pretty permalinks and can change that, but on my Windows host, I can’t.

I decided to completely reinstall WordPress and bbPress and start fresh. After all those databases I tried, I really gunged everything up and needed to clean it out and be sure it’s all working. That only took a day and now I’m merrily customizing and integrating it into my new site design. Still not done, but its getting there.

Forum. Forum. Forum. Forum. Forum. Forum.

1. The current forum software I use on my site is Broadboard, a VBScript ASP forum that has worked quite well. But it’s author stopped maintaining it several years ago, and it uses Microsoft Access as a database, which may limit it in the future. Also, it does not use CSS so would be difficult to adapt to the new site design
    
2. Then I thought about Simple Machines Forum, a full-featured free PHP-based forum. Lots of people like it and it has everything but the kitchen sink, but it felt bloaty to me.
    
3. I took a stab at Google Groups which didn’t look bad. But it wasn’t under my control and wouldn’t link into WordPress, and then I found out about
    
4. Vanilla - a plain vanilla standard-based standards-compliant Forum with plug-in capability
    
5. I started trying to integrate it with WordPress, but then it became obvious to try bbPress, the forum used at WordPress and developed with the same core code that WordPress uses. But bbPress appeared to be a bit too primitive. Then I found…
    
6. Simple Forum - an actual WordPress plugin. Just drop it in and it’s there. Full featured and 100% compatible and pre-integrated with WordPress. I don’t remember the last time I’ve been so impressed by a software package. The author’s site and his support and development of this package is a model for me to follow with Behold.

So hopefully this weekend, I’ll have the new Blog and new Forum all finished (and I will be transferring all my old blog entries and the forum posts over). Then I’ll make sure that my background scripts and integration with my Buy Now page works. If those have few problems, I may be able to get the new redesigned site up by end of next week. Then I’ll finally be able to get back to Behold development.

This new site has taken me 2 months since I announced it. I thought it would only take a few weeks, but that’s the way it goes sometimes. I’ve learned a lot about CSS and new web technologies and PHP scripting and MySQL databases, which will benefit me as I move Behold along.