Although we still offer basic, Free membership, and Paying membership which entitles you to receiving our print magazine Pagoda World and our news letter, as well as full access to our technical manual, the membership system has been completely revamped on the new system.
This group started as a Group on Yahoo! We quickly ran into limitations, the most serious of which was that we had no control over our destiny: Yahoo! could terminate the service at any time, delete attachments, drop content. We had no guarantees.
A number of volunteers got together and decided to develop our own website and pay for hosting it ourselves. For that time (we are talking 2005) quite an advanced system was put together using Snitz Forums and a lot of custom developed ASP code. That system served us very well indeed: the membership was growing, the community active and many posts were made. That success also become our problem: our database grew dramatically, until at some 100MB our hosting provider started becoming problematic. Charging us too much for hosting, and not providing us with enough performance: many users had difficulty posting new items, and searches frequently stopped because too much computer time was needed.
The user system of completely separate forum memberships and full memberships was also giving problems due to the increased userbase. The system administrator received around two or three enquiries per day caused by this.
As the static home pages of the site were developed in a tool for which the sources were no longer available, it was very difficult to maintain these pages: it required in-depth HTML coding knowledge.
Finally, the old content from the Yahoo boards has been added to the beginning of a set of Technical documents, but were really a series of unedited posts from those boards. It was decided to start developing a collaborative Technical Manual, allowing us to take content from Yahoo and the Forums, and structure it into a complete and comprehensive technical manual for our group. That was implemented using a Wiki, and the choice of Wiki was largely determined by our database limitations.
So ultimately it was decided to move to a new system which:
could run on much cheaper, Open Source based, shared webhosting;
used a MySQL database system (moving from MS SQL to MySQL immediately reduced the database size by half due to more efficient storage of data);
has a more modern look and feel;
has a consistent look and feel across the front pages and the forum pages of the site;
provides a Single Sign-In for all members for the forum, the Technical Manual and the front pages;
handles all Full Membership subscription as automatically as possible.
The old incarnation of this system running on the Windows based forum system called Snitz Forums, contained some 60,000 posts. As we did not want to lose that content, we were limited in our choice of forum system to one that allowed us to convert relatively straightforwardly whilst keeping most or all of the content intact. We experimented with 4 different forum software packages, but Simple Machines Forum was the only one which offered us this continuity.
Old forum look and feel
Software used
The site for the Pagoda SL Group consists of three major software packages, which have been integrated and amended to form a single system. This section aims to document the system such that future maintainers can maintain and update the system.
This section is not really interesting to the general public: if you are a moderator or administrator of the system it could be of interest.
The website is hosted with a shared hosting provider. Shared means that the site does not run on it's own computer system buts shares it resources with many other websites. The core of the system is a large database (at the time of writing, november 2008 it is approximately 50MB and grows at a rate of around 10MB per annum). The database contains all the user information and forum messages and posts of the system, as well as the content of the homepage. The database is a MySQL database.
In addition we currently have around 560MB of files: mostly pictures, but also some documents, and of course the Technical Manual. The volume of files grows at around 50-100MB per annum.
The software comprises the following different parts:
the front part, the relatively static information with this documentation and the featured cars. This is implemented in a content management system called Typolight, version 2.6.
the forum, with all its boards, topics and messages. This is implemented using a public domain forum system called Simple Machines Forum (SMF) version 1.6.6.
the technical manual, which is implemented using pmWiki version 2.2.0-beta68. pmWiki is a straightforward Wiki, with a clean design, and stores its content in regular files. For us this was a requirement as the database at the old provider was filling up rapidly.
Next to these standard, and well respected Open Source Software modules, a number of specific modifications were implemented by one of the members of the group (user vanesp). These modifications comprised:
a clean and uncluttered layout and theme for pmWiki;
development of a layout and theme for the Simplemachines Forum based on the pnpn theme;
development of a very similar theme for the Typolight CMS to provide a consistent look and feel between the front end of the website and the forums. Do note that we still allow members to choose their own theme, which results in the forum looking different, but gives users the most flexibility;
development of a Full Member administration, allowing the system to record full memberships (for real world distribution of our magazine, newsletter and other membership benefits). This system is fully integrated with the forum membership system and requires (in contrast to our previous systems) just a single log on. It tracks memberships expiries automatically, reminds members and so on. People who join or renew and pay with PayPal are activated automatically, as the system processes PayPal payment notifications automatically.
