Site Upgrade

It's a big one, and it was long overdue

Well, it has been many years since Crankfire got some backend lovin' (that sentence did not come out the way I was hoping, but I am leaving it anyway). So... now that I have learned many things, become a better programmer and, well, really fell in love with the PhpBB3 forum software, I had no choice but to make with some upgrading.

Ya see, prior to this upgrade, we were running 2 user tables: one for the site (trails, photos, data etc..) and one for the forums. Which I kept synced up with some scripts on the backend. This is certainly not the ideal way to do things and it would make most developers cringe and maybe even poop their pants. Now add in the fact that the code on this site was getting a little "scattered", well...

I was almost losing some sleep over all this. Honest.

It is time.

What's Happening?

Well, most noticeable, we have upgraded our forums to PhpBB3, and in doing so, we are now completely relying on its authentication for user management.

So what does this means to you?

• You will log in to Crankfire through the forums.
• You will manage your user profile through the forums.
• PhpBB3 is pretty new, so expect some issues for a bit.
• PhpBB3 is really really featuriffic. You shall enjoy using it.

But wait, there is more...

The backend of this site has been more or less completely rewritten. It is smarter, faster, cleaner and much better organized. This in turn then made me clean up a lot of the pages here. So you might notice just about every page has been reworked.

• Data: Trails Page = Upgrade!    Waypoint Page = Upgrade!
• Racing: Main Page = Upgrade!    Racer Profile = Upgrade!
• Little shiny icons EVERYWHERE. May have went a little overboard, but I like them and I think they improve usability.
• Ok, really everything got a good going through and polish. Poke around, I hope you like it.

Look around, I think things are much cleaner, easier to use, and, well, efficient.

Still lots more to do though

Apart from fixing the bugs I created by doing all this, I still have more lined up:

• Google Mapper Upgrade (should be pretty damn cool)
• Site searches and filtering. I really want to make "stuff" here easier to find.
• More data sharing intiatives - our GeoRSS feeds are nice, but I am thinking about more map, video and photo sharing across the whole wide internet.

In conclusion

It is inevitable that you will find things that are broken, bugs, whatever. If you do, please either drop me an email or post something up in our fancy new forums.