Tuesday 18 June 2013

Post Script

Yesterday, fully ten days after our Memberkit software suffered a seemingly terminal malfunction, which brought down the whole of our Members' Area, it sprang to life again, as suddenly as it had died. Too late! Ten days' downtime is not acceptable for a busy website like this, and now that I have rebuilt the site with WordPress I shall be sticking with the new version. I have removed the Memberkit software from our server. It was an expensive experiment, which was the only solution three years ago, at a time when WordPress couldn't do what we wanted (or if it could, it was beyond my programming skills). Now, though, WordPress does what we want and more, a lot better and with much more ease than Memberkit, so there is no reason to go back. It is reassuring to know, though, that the problem did not stem from anything we did. I suspect that if and when WordPress chooses to go down, it will not take 10 days for its engineers to fix it.

Saturday 15 June 2013

Members' Area — Final Stage Complete

I should have added that our new Members' Area is now officially open.

New Announcements Page

From now on, all news and information of an administrative nature — i.e. anything that's of interest only to our Members — will be posted in the Members' Area of the website. This news page will be reserved for more general news.

Wednesday 12 June 2013

Members' Area — First Stage Complete

Much of the Members' Area is now rebuilt. WordPress is delightfully easy to use, and the Directory plug-in works beautifully. Much easier than the previous software, and only one bug so far. I reported the bug on the support forum, and got an almost instant reply that the developers were already working on fixing the problem! Members are invited to create entries for the Directory as from now. You will find the new Members' Area here.

Sunday 9 June 2013

Transferring the Members' Area to WordPress

Our Members' Area is still down (see yesterday's post). This does not look good. Server problems don't usually last this long. We can't afford this sort of unprovoked malfunction. Our membership software (Memberkit) was always buggy and unfortunately the developers have long since lost interest and stopped developing it, or providing updates and support (let alone ironing out the bugs). I can only assume that one of our members did something while creating or updating their profile that coincided precisely with a server glitch or outage, which caused the system to crash and burn. It may even have been one of the many bugs that overwhelmed the whole system. I just don't know and I can't do anything to fix it. At the time of purchase, just over three years ago, the Memberkit software seemed ideal (if expensive). But the trouble was that there were not enough users. There was a rather sketchy and out-of-date User Guide, but apart from that, once the 90-day support ran out, I was on my own. The users' forum had too few participants to be of help, and one's questions remained unanswered and problems unresolved. The time has come to migrate to WordPress, with its much larger market share. According to Wikipedia at the time of writing, WordPress is used on 60 million web sites. I have already installed it on our server. And there are loads of tutorials and manuals out there to help me get started, and plug-ins for every conceivable application. Reconstruction work will start as soon as I can find time to build what we need. Our new Members' Area will undoubtedly have a quite different look and feel. Perhaps it will have even more functionality than what we had before. But there is every chance that it will be more reliable. Of course, this only affects members' listings on the website (headshots and biographies etc). Nothing else about DepList is affected, and messaging and advertising continue to function as normal.

Saturday 8 June 2013

Members' Area is Down

The Members' Area part of our website is not functioning. I don't know why. I hope it's just a temporary server problem which will sort itself out. It's certainly not the result of anything I've done, as I've made no changes to the website recently, and it was functioning perfectly well earlier this week. The Members' Area is quite separate from the rest of the website. It is interactive and therefore depends on a database. Our server is nominally in the USA, but of course it could be anywhere. The database for the Members' Area may be hosted on an entirely different server. I'm hoping the glitch is a temporary communication problem between the main server that hosts our static files and the database server that enables the dynamic Members' Area files to function.