(RFD) Amiga.org's future

[Klatch]

May have already been mentioned, But I have 3 websites I maintain. All 3 use php4 without the hosting company saying I have to upgrade, They did offer me an upgrade to php5 awhile back, I had no reason to bother with it.

Oh and they are linux servers

[Alcamino]

Wayne,

Many thanks for your hard work in maintaining this site until now.

I think the upgrade should be done as you see fit to make the site better.

Hope it goes smoother than you anticipate.

Cheers,

Al
 8-)

[ColorAtlas]

Since Amiga, Inc. has become bogged down to the point that I don't think any new hardware is forthcoming and the makers of OS4 are engaged in a legal mess with Amiga, Inc., I've had to satisfy myself with an Amiga emulation written by Cloanto (WinUAE), for Windows.  Therefore, when it comes to browsing, I use the Windows system on my laptop computer and I run the Amiga software I want, in an emulation on the same machine.  I still have my Amiga 2000, but this is a much slower machine than that afforded me by the emulator.  So, for myself, I would be unaffected by an upgrade to this site.  I come to this site, to see if there has been any progress in releasing a native Amiga computer or progress toward letting OS4 run on other computers (if nobody wants to make hardware for the Amiga, anymore).

[dslcc]

I haven't used an Amiga browser seriously since early 2004. I also stop by here from time to time just out of curiosity to read some of the discussions. It's too bad that there hasn't been much Amiga web browser development in the past few years, but that is the way that it is for now.

I guess my opinion then is to upgrade the site as you see fit.

David :-?

[Amiduffer]

Wayne. You're damn awesome!  :hat: This has been an terrific place to get help for our poor orphan equipment. There's no way in hell I'm ever going to get my A3000 online, and after looking at AWeb through WinUAE, I don't see the point of going through the trouble. If reality is making you change, then do it. Its your site, and you should do what you feel is more beneficial and easier on your soul. Just archive all these threads!:-D

If someone wants a forum that the classic machines can access, let them start their own.

[Hans_]

ColorAtlas wrote:
I come to this site, to see if there has been any progress in releasing a native Amiga computer or progress toward letting OS4 run on other computers (if nobody wants to make hardware for the Amiga, anymore).

You're a bit out of date with your information on Amiga OS 4. New hardware is being manufactured by Acube. There are also various dealers such as AmigaKit from which these systems can be purchased.

Hans

[Plaz]

If you use a package that can support mobile do you have to essentially do two separate sites, or is a mobile site simply rendered from the full site automatically?

That way you have a full normal site and a stripped down version of the site hopefully more compatible with old browsers. I see mobile's a touchy subject, but if one package easily sources both, it seems like a good alternative.

Plaz

[Plaz]

BTW, is there some how we can keep our karma ratings? I worked a long time for those 5 little checked boxes and I like my seven year old join date. :-P

Plaz

[the_leander]

Hi Wayne, sorry in a way to see the old girl go, however, if you're on the lookout for possible candidates for a new cms (I remember your comments to me about what a pig xoops was to work with), have you considered e107?

I've used it on a couple of sites and found it to be very robust and easy to use.

[whoosh777]

As most of you have heard, the site's software will -- by necessity -- need to change shortly to accommodate the mandatory upgrades to PHP.

To recap, keeping the current (7 year old) version of Xoops that we run for compatibility is no longer possible. There are core changes within PHP that would require us to minimally upgrade to a later version of Xoops which isn't HTML 3.x compatible (which is pretty much all the classic Amiga will handle).

While it's possible to go through the entire code base and change every line of code to be PHP 5 compatible, the amount of work involved is staggering compared to the returns realized (we'd still be running seven year old, unsupported software).

this is probably an ignorant suggestion,

but if the problem is the dependency on PHP 4,

couldnt you just change the host? :-D

namecheap.com is very cheap hosting, about

$6 a month for modest hosting,

by default they are PHP 5, but they support
both PHP 4 and PHP 5. You can select which from
the php configuration in the controls

But maybe I misunderstood the full problem and
there are other dependency problems.

 :crazy:

the current graphics of the forum are fine
and more sophisticated than the few
non Amiga forums I have used.

you never see stuff like this elsewhere:

:flame: :destroy: :roflmao:

and that guys avatar with the fly flying around
in this discussion, a bit morbid but impressive!
there isnt that level of graphics outside of the Amiga scene.

the version of Xoops may be legacy but the usage is
STILL ahead of what PC users :madashell: use

its not what you have, but what you do with what you
have that matters. PCs today are more powerful than
my uni mainframe, but the performance is worse than
the Amiga 500. eg XP can only have at most 26 partitions
as they label these A, B, C, ... Z AND you can only
have a maximum of 4 bootable partitions per drive, as even
2009 mobos dont support booting from logical partitions.

if you go beyond 26 partitions on Windows eg insert
an extra flash drive then it cannot be used until
you relabel from another labelled partition.


But the earliest Amiga HD's had an UNLIMITED number of
partitions and an UNLIMITED number of boot partitions.

On the Amiga you can do accent symbols eg é

as alt-f e  but try googling for how you do that with
XP, its very complicated

(alt 0233 for é)


Alternatively if you set up your own server you
could install the necessary legacy dependencies,

but I know nothing about rolling your own server!

[the_leander]

whoosh777 wrote:


this is probably an ignorant suggestion,

but if the problem is the dependency on PHP 4,

couldnt you just change the host? :-D

The problem is that support for PHP 4 is ending, meaning any security issues that crop up from this point foward will not be addressed by the maintainers as they have in the past.

Do you remember what happened to this place when it was running on PHP nuke prior to the great shutdown? Do you?

whoosh777 wrote:
the version of Xoops may be legacy but the usage is
STILL ahead of what PC users :madashell: use

Care to supply a citation for that?

whoosh777 wrote:
its not what you have, but what you do with what you
have that matters. PCs today are more powerful than
my uni mainframe, but the performance is worse than
the Amiga 500. eg XP can only have at most 26 partitions
as they label these A, B, C, ... Z AND you can only
have a maximum of 4 bootable partitions per drive, as even
2009 mobos dont support booting from logical partitions.

if you go beyond 26 partitions on Windows eg insert
an extra flash drive then it cannot be used until
you relabel from another labelled partition.


But the earliest Amiga HD's had an UNLIMITED number of
partitions and an UNLIMITED number of boot partitions.

All very interesting and utterly pointless in this discussion. And quite frankly, I'll take 3 or 4 partitions on a one Terabyte drive over 50 on a 4Gb drive or whatever the limitation is now.

None of this changes the fact that the site must move on. :roll:

whoosh777 wrote:
On the Amiga you can do accent symbols eg é

as alt-f e  but try googling for how you do that with
XP, its very complicated

é is Alt-Gr E. (right hand alt key.) Very complicated indeed!

whoosh777 wrote:
Alternatively if you set up your own server you
could install the necessary legacy dependencies,

but I know nothing about rolling your own server!

It's a ball ache, it's expensive, but most of all, it doesn't solve the fundamental issue that the site would as time went on become more and more vulnerable to hacking and or other mischief.

Also, and let's be clear here. Wayne has run this site for the better part of a decade now, he could have pulled the plug long ago and there were times in this little soap operas history where he could have done so justifiably. But he didn't. He catered to a tiny, fractious and in some cases downright nasty community far beyond what most people would have done, he held the line whilst most others dropped by the wayside.

Technology moves on. So suck it up.

[adz]

the_leander wrote:

Also, and let's be clear here. Wayne has run this site for the better part of a decade now, he could have pulled the plug long ago and there were times in this little soap operas history where he could have done so justifiably. But he didn't. He catered to a tiny, fractious and in some cases downright nasty community far beyond what most people would have done, he held the line whilst most others dropped by the wayside.

Technology moves on. So suck it up.

As always, well said! :mickeymouse:

[Marcb]

NoFastMem wrote:
One doesn't honour the dead by mounting the corpse in plain view.

That one sentence summarises the whole argument for me.
For Amiga.org to cater to Amigans it is not at all necessary that Amiga.org also caters for Amiga Browsers.
Browsing on the Amiga is not a big part of the fond memories I have of using an Amiga when they were at the leading edge, I tried it using Mosaic way back then and compared to today's Opera etc. it sucked.:-)

Let's not forget that access to Amiga.org is free and as someone else said, if you want to access it with Ibrowse or Aweb or for gods sake Mosaic then that is really your battle to get it going.


I own a few Amigas and some of them are on my network and do share my internet connection but I could count the number of times I've read Amiga.org using a Miggy with the fingers on one hand.
They are connected to the internet mostly for the sake of doing it and also to download from Aminet but for reading forums I use my PC or my Ipod.

@Wayne,

Thank you for the use of your site and for putting this topic up for discussion.
As far as I'm concerned, I'm a guest in your home and I'll go with whatever changes you wish/need to make.


   

[the_leander]

adz wrote:

the_leander wrote:

Also, and let's be clear here. Wayne has run this site for the better part of a decade now, he could have pulled the plug long ago and there were times in this little soap operas history where he could have done so justifiably. But he didn't. He catered to a tiny, fractious and in some cases downright nasty community far beyond what most people would have done, he held the line whilst most others dropped by the wayside.

Technology moves on. So suck it up.

As always, well said! :mickeymouse:

TY :-D

You know I've been thinking that when I go on a rant like that I need a image saying something like "The Leander's seal of finality" or something  :lol:

[Spyros]

Regarding CMS solutions, although I haven't really used Drupal (just installed it once, saw it requires Register Globals to be on and uninstalled it :-) ) I've seen a friend's website getting hacked 4 times in a row despite upgrading to the latest version. Could happen to any Open Source CMS though.
 
Joomla is more or less ok. Some things about it I like, some things I don't.
I made a website with it a few months ago, but had to correct a few mistakes at the core to get some modules to work as they should.
Joomla's got plenty of modules, but they're always a security risk, meaning that you might have the latest version of the CMS installed, but there could be a mistake at a third party module you're using.

As far as classic Amiga compatibility is concerned, I'm writing this on a Peecee  :-( , but I like to see some sites working (especially Amiga sites) when browsing with my Amiga.
Writing an old standards front end for Joomla shouldn't be much of a problem, as you can override the modules' output. This way you can write the main template with the old standards and then override the modules you use to output accordingly.

There's a drawback though when overriding the output. Whenever there's an update, you'll have to compare the files that are updated with the files that you have changed and make the required corrections.
That's even worse of course if you've made changes to the core, or some modules' internals.

There's also going to be an issue with preserving content, but there should be components for PHPBB etc, although I don't know how correctly written or secure they are.

You could also check out PHP-Nuke (I think it was called), or see if you can override Xoops' output in its latest versions, as you can with Joomla.

To conclude, I can't really decide as far as the template is concerned. There should have been some CSS support for our old browsers at least.
Sticking to the latest standards will save you a lot of work, but on the other hand, this site is about people with outdated hardware and software (that's us :-D ).
It all depends on the amount of your free time and your patience.

P.S. You could also check the site's statistics for visitors' browsers to aid in your decision, or make two templates (one conforming to the old standards and one to the new) for people to choose from, or load automatically upon browser detection.

[pVC]

NoFastMem wrote:

Now, as ever, I think that Amiga.org should serve the classic Amiga community in the same way the C64 sites do, or whatever. No-one at those sites worries whether they're going to render okay on a Spectrum.

I just plainly hate these C64 comparisons when talking about web surfing. I think everyone should know how different capablilities these computers have.

Those who surf daily with Amiga (and compatibles) have 24bit gfx-cards with high resolutions etc. There simply is absolutely no point to try to say anything about C64 within this content. Amiga was there when internet made breakthrough and has always been usable with it. Nobody can seriously say that C64 has ever had the potential for any kind of serious net usage.

And what have Spectrums to do with C64? Stop that flipping trolling, please.