Shambling towards modern web design

This website has been moved to a new content management platform. (Sorry that took so long, by the way! The combination of the creaky old site software and the huge amount of content threw us some curveballs).

Here is the bare minimum you need to know:

• If you have an account, and have posted content at some point: your account has been migrated over, but you will have to set a new password.
• If you have an account, but never posted any content: you will have to create a new account. (Reasons for both of these are explained below).

More detail below…

Why this is happening

Short version: The content management system upon which Piggington was built stopped being the right tool for the job quite a while ago. So, the site has been moved to more suitable platform, resulting in the changes described below. 

(Longer version: This site has been running on a content management system called Drupal since 2005 or so. I can’t remember exactly why I chose this over the other options, but anyway: while it was fine for a while, over time Drupal has really moved in the direction of hosting large and complex sites, while this site has remained notably non-complex. Running on Drupal was needlessly expensive and complicated for a site like this, and it made it difficult to do updates, which – combined with my sloth – is why Piggington has been trapped in amber for a long time. So, I’ve finally done what I should have long ago, and had the whole thing migrated to WordPress.)

Some differences from the old site

A lot the improvements are in the background – the site will be more secure, less costly to maintain, and easier to keep up to date. But there are plenty of user-facing differences as well:

• We have, at long last, moved on from the 2005-vintage fixed width design. The new site will adapt to whatever device you are viewing it from, and specifically will be a lot more usable on mobile devices than before.
• Both the user forum and the private message system are now running on software that is less ancient and generally a lot better than before. (Note: rich text editor coming soon).
• No more Google ads.
• Some of the old migrated content looks a little ugly. I was mostly focused on getting things to work better going forward. (And it takes a while to update all the image links, so if you find missing images in old content, check back later).
• There is some minor hassle for readers with accounts:
• One of the problems with the old site was an absolutely massive ongoing infestation of spambot accounts. There were nearly 500,000 accounts, the vast majority of which were bots. The cleanest way to purge these was to delete accounts that had never created any content. So even if you were a “real” user, if you never created any content, you didn’t get transfered over and will have to create a new account. Sorry for the hassle. (But fwiw, you didn’t lose any info that wouldn’t have been lost in the migration anyway).
• If you had posted content at some point, then your account was migrated over. But your password was stored encrypted, which is good for security but means that we couldn’t see your password to move it to the new site. So you’ll have to reset your password.

That’s all I can think of for now. On the whole, I think/hope that this upgrade will make for a better experience for Pigg users as a whole. If you have problems (not griping, but actual problems that require admin help to fix), you can email me at rich@piggington.com.