The old site was so clunky, so hard to get around and so difficult to maintain that I have long wanted to move it to my beloved WordPress. Also I know WordPress would bump our google ratings so that more people who need us could find us. I was holding out for BuddyPress to come out of beta but the more I read about it, the more I knew that it would be a huge new learning curve and meanwhile the hosting account for the old OAS install was about to come due. So I had to do something.

I decided to go ahead and make the leap figuring I could do a lot with plugins that would give the community functionality and hopefully up our participation. So the new site is here: http://www.openbookblogging.com (the OAS.com domain will go live there on Valentine’s Day).

Anyone has the ability — nay, the RIGHT — to post on the blog. Logging in will take you to a truncated WordPress dashboard and you can add blog posts and events. You can’t edit anyone’s posts but your own (and no one’s comments but your own) but you can see them all there. Don’t freak out — you’re not on the true backend and you can’t break anything. Also when you login, you will automatically have access to the forum.

The forum is for members only. I thought about making it read-only for folks outside the community but decided against it to encourage greater sharing. I can create more forums if people need them but after talking to Brandy and Jenna, I decided not to break the forums up by triad members. (I think this makes things more divisive and Brandy & Jenna, who have much more adoption forum experience, affirmed this.

Things still left to do:

1. I was able to bring over all the content but when I imported it, it came in with me as the author. I’m working on fixing this. It also stripped the names from comments and that I can’t fix. Anyway I need to remap the posts.
2. And I need to add the links.
3. And I need to write some how-to info for members.

Those of you who are members can login with your old username and password but you should edit your profile details. If you have trouble getting in, let me know. (If you have trouble with anything, let me know.)

I’m using an alpha (not ready for the wild) version of BBPress, the forum software, because it’s the only one that integrates so well with WordPress 2.7. Which means it may have some bugs and it doesn’t have some functionalities I wanted (private messaging). I hope this will change as the software improves.

Anyway! Try it out. Let me know what you think!

(sigh) I think it’s just having such an enormous blog and also having played with plugins and themes so often through the years. I might be wrong about that. I’ve been blogging for 9 years come next month and I have (not counting this one) 3,298 posts, 15,220 approved comments, 4 pages, 24 categories and 967 tags. I’m using 11 widgets and since installing Akismet, I’ve blocked 41,652 spam comments.

Before this I was on Moveable Type. Before that I was hand-coding my entries in basic html.

In short, I have a huge, unwieldy blog and upgrades rarely go smoothly.

I meant to post a good post today but instead I’m going to spend my non-working, non-parenting time today trying to fix this. Rats.