We switched to Wordpress
I’ve been coding The Music Tank for a while now, but the sheer amount of features missing from my code scared me into porting The Music Tank to Wordpress. I was already using an out-of-the-box version for my personal website and have lots of trust in this blogging engine. I also had friends who were already customizing it, so that kinda sealed the deal.
Good job staffers!
To my surprise, we had written about 700 posts (features + news) since the website went back online. One of the priorities was not to lose all our content in a big updates… for the first time of the site’s existence ;).
The process of making templates that looked at least similar to what we had before and the migration of the data (almost manually) took me about 2 days. Not bad.
Where’s my stuff?
There will be a temporary setback in the number of features we offer on the website while I continue porting The Music Tank to Wordpress. A few links ought to still be broken but we’ll be hunting for these during the following week.
The user profiles and the whole reviews/rating sections are down but the previous posts have not been lost.
User profiles
I currently can’t migrate that information because your passwords were saved encrypted. The new commenting system should already be working but you’ll need to create new profiles… again. I will manually be associating previous posts you may have done with these new user accounts as I see them popping up. That sucks, I know.
Reviews
Because we hope to be a community driven website, my main focus will be around the review section. I want you guys to be able to submit your opinions on new albums as soon as possible. I just need to learn how to make a Wordpress plug-in first… and that’s a whole lot nerdier than it sounds.
New design
You may be noticing a difference between this version of the design and the previous one. The point was just to make it look “ok” as soon as possible so my update doesn’t get in the way of news posting. This temporary version uses the Blueprint CSS library which helped speed things up quite a bit.
Somewhere between the Reviews module and my updates to the news, I’ll be pushing in a new design I have yet to finish. In the meantime, hopefully you won’t mind some of the design decisions.
Developer Blog
Lastly, I just want to mention this blog will be dedicated to site updates, likely some technical stuff, and maybe staff events (e.g. “We’ll be at the Saul Williams show, meet us there!”). It probably won’t be updated as often as the others and it will definitely stand outsides of the music scope, but it should still be an interesting read.