We are in the process of migrating The Turning Gate away from MediaTemple’s servers, onto new hosting with Linode. I will endeavor to keep this status report up-to-date with our progress. It’s a slow migration, and one that we are attempting to perform incrementally, and carefully.
theturninggate.net Domain
theturninggate.net domain name now points to the new stuff!
Status: Complete
Backlight
The new Backlight instance is now live!
Status: Complete(-ish)
Blog
The new blog is now live!
Status: Complete
Community
The new community forum is live; the old forum is now read-only.
The old forum still lives on the old server, and needs to be moved.
Status: Nearly complete …
Documentation
Documentation for Backlight 3 has been rebuilt and now lives on the Backlight microsite, at https://backlight.me.
Status: Complete.
Sendy
Sendy, our newsletters software, has been successfully migrated to Linode.
Status: Complete.
Shop
Purchasing for Backlight 3 has been rebuilt and now lives on the Backlight microsite, at https://backlight.me.
Status: Complete.
Update:
Rather than just pick up the old blog and move it, I’ve chosen to migrate content into a fresh blog. I like clean slates, and I mean to eliminate cruft.
All posts have been migrated to the new blog using the All-in-One WP Migration plugin. I am happy to report that the process was super easy, and appears to have gone without a hitch. I did need to temporarily edit my php.ini file to allow the upload of my 452.8MB content backup (which included the database and media).
I’ve kept the posts, but have deleted all comments, and will be keeping comments disabled forever more. Conversation should happen here in the forum.
I have the pages, but with the way we’re reorganizing The Turning Gate, they will probably go unused and will be deleted, pending review.
With comments off, I have no need for Akismet or other spam prevention plugins. That helps to keep things simple. The only plugins I am likely to enable are Classic Editor, Wordfence Security, WP-Optimize, and Yoast SEO.
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Update:
Having settled on this Discourse forum as the new home for our community, we have begun the process of sunsetting the prior forum. New user registration and new topic creation are disabled there; replies may still be made to existing topics while wrap up conversations already in-progress. Replies will eventually be disabled there as well.
All new business and conversation should be here now, and we look forward to the rest of our users migrating over in time. I will include the announcement in our next newsletter.
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Update:
Have spent a part of today working on the Template Presets page, from which it is possible to download pre-made templates for Backlight’s designer. This area hasn’t gotten much love in the past, simply because it seems to to mostly unused. I don’t know whether that will change, but I might take another crack at breathing some life into it …
Previously, the presets were served up via Wordpress as part of The Turning Gate’s custom child theme, which extends the them from Backlight. However, with the new version of the site, Wordpress will be taking a backseat, and will only be serving the blog.
The presets will now be served from a Backlight page, using PHPlugins. I’m excited about this, as it simplifies the implementation quite a bit, and makes things easier to move around and maintain. It’s looking good at the moment; hopefully we won’t find anything broken when it goes live with a Backlight update. I’m sure you’ll all let me know, though, right?
Backlight won’t get you there yet, but for those who’d like to see it, here’s the new presets page.
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Update:
Starting to populate the new Backlight instance with new albums. In the course of creating new demonstration albums, I’m revisiting some of my older, Lightroom-processed images now in Capture One Pro. I was dreading having to re-edit old work, but it’s actually been pretty cool, and I’m liking the new edits far better than the old. Have also taken the opportunity to cut or replace some images in existing collections. Neat stuff. More to come.
New Galleries
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Update:
theturninggate.net domain name now points to the new stuff!
The new blog is now live!
The new Backlight instance is now live, and is mostly set with demonstrations! I probably need to add a few more, and may need to tweak things a bit.
The old forum is now read-only; it still resides on the old host, so needs to be moved. But the new Discourse forum is everything insofar as support and communication goes.
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