New Website Migration
As you've probably may have noticed, we have a new website. Although I strongly believe that this website has many more stuff to offer, I still want for people to get used of the website as smoothly as possible.
I am glad you asked! See this is the 4th redesign and now I have more experience on migrating from the old to a new website.
The real reason that I am doing that is that the 3rd redesign of the website didn't go very well 😳. Although the redesign for me was at that period 10 times better than I initially thought, people (included me) don't like changes.
I've created two thumbnails here that you can click and see in full screen the old versus the new website way back on 2016:
Everything has changed! I thought that this brand-new website will also bring more viewers. That the users that are already using Grocery CRUD will be as enthusiasts as I am, and they will love it!
However, this never happened. Instead, I was losing users. Let me repeat that! My new shiny website was losing users 😞.
And that's why we now have a migration period, that's all 😃
We will have two sections that we would like to migrate:
- The main website
- The forums
1. Main website migration
The main website will start with a link to the old website and with a new domain just to not confuse people. From there I will collect some statistics about how the users interact with the new website and start changing some parts here and there just to make sure that we don't have any major issues (e.g. a 404 page). After that I will then do quite the opposite, having the new website as the main domain and then the old one into a sub folder. Something like the website of bootstrap: New Website - getbootstrap.com vs Old Website: getbootstrap.com/docs/3.4/
2. Forums migration
Now about the forums, this will be a tough one! As you may already know, I am receiving a lot of spam... like A LOT. I've tried many things, but I guess we are in a point that spammers are people that are registering and then the bots are updating the posts. And that's really hard to deal with. The good news is that I have a brand-new forum with discourse. Discourse is handling spam with Akismet that it is the best spam filter of all time 🤗. What was I saying 🤔 ? Oh right! Migration!
So the migration will be to inform all the users that we are moving to a new forum and we will have a short period of migration. After that period, the old forums will be read-only and the brand new will just roll! The new forums will have a new domain, and it will stay that way.
Let's cross our fingers 🤞 and see if everything will go as per my initial plan. Usually it doesn't and that's the good thing about life to be honest ❤️.
Feb 22, 2021 by John Skoubourdis