A (good) big change is coming!

Discussion in 'Site news and updates' started by Jeff, May 11, 2015.

  1. Jeff

    Jeff Administrator Staff Member

    Joined:
    Oct 5, 2006
    Messages:
    149
    Likes Received:
    17
    Hey everyone,

    Toyota Minis just began its 11th year of existence on the Internet. Huge thanks to all of the members who have been around since the 'early days' and who continue to visit the site daily to find out what's going on in the Toyota mini truck scene. :bowdown::headbang:

    Over the past 10 years, our forum software, VBulletin, has served us pretty well. However, it is now starting to show its age and I've been looking for a suitable replacement/upgrade. Luckily, there is a fine piece of discussion forum software that has a fairly easy upgrade path from VBulletin. After all, our goal is to create the most seamless user upgrade experience possible.

    The new forum software has MUCH better mobile-friendliness so that the site will look and work great on your smartphones and tablets. Also, the forum has better integration with social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, making it easier than ever to share your posts with your non ToyotaMinis friends. There's a ton of other great features, but one of the most useful (in my mind) is the ability to "like" posts. This is a nice feature to give kudos to someone who has answered your question for you, or just generally made a post that you enjoyed. Oh, and the new forum software is FAST. :D

    We're currently working on developing the look & feel of the revised site and testing all of the user functionality to ensure that everything goes smoothly. We are targeting a late May/early June upgrade timline and I'll make another announcement as we get closer to the switchover date. It will likely happen on a weekend and it will likely require the forum to be offline for a number of hours.

    I'm really looking forward to modernizing the site and continuing to offer cool new features for you all. :waytogo:

    Jeff
    Owner, ToyotaMinis.com
     
    _Quickfox, Hagan Quinto and amfel10 like this.
  2. Jeff

    Jeff Administrator Staff Member

    Joined:
    Oct 5, 2006
    Messages:
    149
    Likes Received:
    17
    Hey guys,

    Sorry for so long without an update on this. My busy schedule has made it difficult to get the upgrade completed as quickly as I had hoped.

    The good news is that I will be performing the upgrade over the new year's holiday weekend (this weekend). During the upgrade period, the forum will be down/unavailable. I anticipate most of this downtime will be on Friday, January 1.

    Once the upgrade is complete, you can come back to the site and login with your current username/password. I'll start a thread in General Discussion for feedback and discussion on the changes.

    As with many upgrades, I anticipate that there may be a few small bumps in the road. I've done quite a lot of testing of the new forum software in a development/testing environment, but we may still discover some small issues to resolve once the site goes live.
     

Share This Page