Development Update (We're almost there!)

[Tristan]

In addition to getting your thoughts on a platform change, I also wanted to take a minute to give everyone an idea of what I'd like to accomplish during the month of September.  I realize that most, if not all of you, are here about the transit, and my goal is to get more of what you're looking for in place here.

Now it's pretty certain that I will be moving this site to a new platform, and that new platform will allow me to do some things much easier than we can do those things today.  To that end, I will try to get rosters started and updated for each transit system in the Transit Zone as the first step after the upgrade.  Part of that will be the implementation of "Live Rosters", a concept I mentioned months ago, that will allow members to update rosters as they make observations on things, with certain caveats (*one* sighting of a bus with a different run number might not be enough to say that bus is now housed at a different garage, for example).

I would also like to get more user-generated content in place -- primarily, that means photo, video, and audio galleries.  You've noticed that I have looked at a couple different platforms for this, and abandoned one in favor of another; this platform change will cause one more change, and I'm actually glad that there isn't so much in either of the two galleries that I'd have to move.  One of the issues I have is that I want something that integrates better into my future plans for the site's content, not just something that stores a bunch of photos.

Where you come in:
I am in dire need of up-to-date AND HISTORIC roster data.  My intention with Live Rosters is to post a monthly dump (or less often, depending on the system) in the forums that will freeze in time some of the observations posted...so we'll always have an idea of where certain buses were based.  But, my mind has a tendency to focus on the present -- I love history but I can't remember where certain buses started their lives or what garages they live at now, and that's something some of you are very good at keeping track of.  I am going to try to go live with Live Rosters on October 1 (I think it'll be easier on all of us to do this stuff at the beginning of the month), and so data from September's observations will be included.  Now, let me know if you might be interested in helping to compile a spreadsheet of some of this data, and that will free me up to finalize things in other areas.

Those are my goals for September, and I will try to keep this thread up to date and continue doing this each month.  Let me know if you have any questions or comments!

[Tristan]

A late update to the migration process:

The image gallery situation is holding things up right now but I think I'm starting to break through the fog.  I would just roll things out without the image handling in place, but I don't want to risk starting something up and then finding out that it isn't right because it can't handle images properly, then I have to start all over again with a bunch of content that might or might not be importable.

I expect within the week to finalize that situation though, and expect right now to move things over by the first week of November.  Stay tuned.

[Tristan]

November Update:

So I'm sitting here with the flu feeling sorry for myself...why not work on the site?  Maybe I'll have screenshots and stuff soon so you actually know things are happening! 

Some time in late October, I somehow destroyed the first install of Drupal, but I know how to reproduce everything I did that was actually important, and it let me rethink some of it to make it simpler...I intended to play around with that install, get it where I wanted, then kill it and start fresh anyway, so it wasn't much of a setback.

I am pretty sure I got media handling taken care of; in the next 2-3 days, I'm just gonna make sure I can present stuff in a way that makes sense...then I've got a little more work to do with rosters, and...I think I'll be comfortable with letting it out into the world!  I'm reluctant to provide specific dates now because I've blown through a couple of my own deadlines, but I think early December sounds reasonable.