New Website Design

[Scooter]

I've spent the past six days rebuilding the main Replant.ca website, trying to make it cleaner and more modern, and mobile-friendly. This update is about four years overdue. I've been testing it on various desktop resolutions, plus tablets and phones, but if anyone notices anything odd please email me. I think most of the work is done now, except for trying to find any bugs in the coding.

www.replant.ca

[_I3^RELATIVISM]

hey @scooter did you ever consider using discourse instead of current php forum system? Very well maintained codebase, active on FOSS movement, and also would give a nice refresh look to this forum. Which I believe iis the reason this forum no longer being very popular among planters, even though is as huge potential and very important information.
sorry if this is not the correct threath but coulndt find one on this topic. Cheers

[_I3^RELATIVISM]

As a follow up,

Discourse has a plugin/bridge for matrix chat services, which then bridges with many socialmedia platforms twitter, and instagram. So even though I know this would be a massive project I think it should be considered for the future in order to none of this amazing information being lost. and actually start migrating planters away from social media and into selfhosted ethical infrastructure.
https://meta.discourse.org/t/chatroom-i ... /66522/220

Cheers.

[Scooter]

Hm, I thought that I had answered your previous question in September. Apparently the post didn't save.

One big problem right now is that I can't migrate since the auto-migrate tools from PHPBB to Discourse only work on older versions of the software. Developers are obviously trying to get more up-to-date to allow modern versions of the software to migrate, but for now the version that "works" is about 18 months behind the current software. So at best, I could stop allowing the regular updates to the PHPBB software and wait for a year or so for the technology to catch up.

The current PHPBB implementation is also FOSS, so no advantage there for switching.

The idea situation would be to have this board allow Facebook log-ins, because then we'd have the best of both worlds - retaining the archive of existing info here, plus suddenly opening up "membership" to a huge new userbase overnight. But all currently uauth plug-ins that permit cross sign-in still require someone to set up an account here first, and then the ability to sign in with facebook is simply a convenience option tied to your board account, rather than bypassing the need to create an account in the first place. And most of those plug-ins aren't supported properly and die after a few months, since they're not part of the integral PHPBB codeset that is supported by the full dev community.

So I agree with your mindset and end-goal, but when I look into options each winter, nothing has really jumped out as a perfect solution just yet. Hopefully that will change eventually.

[_I3^RELATIVISM]

hey @scooter ounce again,
Thanks for the the reply, as for facebook I have a quite biased view on that given dont really support or get used (be a user) by that monopolistic organization. Regardeless I would be happy to help icentivize push this vision foward.
I will also be mostly free now until begining of season to help various FOSS projects(hyperbola.info, replicant.us, dark.fi, heads coreboot payload among others), So I would be happy to add this to my TODO and to help with updating the forum, given with current look most people dont really use it anymore.
There are 2 options:
1. migrate to discouse, I found a couple good migration scripts, dont know if discourse is desired though (version also might not be compatible <version3.3)
2. Do some sort of styling on top of phpBB, like skins/themes (volare is a great theme for instance it uses js though > version3.2)

I would advise the first one, given I have a very pleasent expirence with discourse in past as well as federation possibility within activitypub protocol, just now I have made some tests on my local server, but now to do a public instance for you to checkout. I would need a test stmp server, so like email server also would be usefull to have a subdomain ready for such (discuss.replant.ca, for instance), if not I can just buy replant.io domain or something like that. Would love to hear your feedback on this in the hope I could do some progress on this before the may mark

references:
https://meta.discourse.org/t/importing- ... /30810/674
https://themeforest.net/popular_item/by ... rums/phpbb

Cheers Alexis

[Scooter]

I think the easiest thing is to just let it be. I think it makes sense to keep this phpbb forum alive, but mostly just to act as a historical repository. There are a number of new mods on the r/treeplanting page at Reddit who are doing a great job of turning that into a great alternative to facebook and here. I enjoyed nurturing this online community back when it was the only real option, but now that there is organic growth in other online communities, I don't think that Replant needs to control everything.

Thanks for the offer though, I really appreciate it.