Due to the very high number of spam attempts, unfortunately it has been neccssary to suspend registrations for the forum.
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Not much has happened on the site recently – busy doing other things! The web page performance issues appear to be much improved. The hosting company have been well aware of the problems and although they have not provided details, they have taken some actions. There are still odd occasions when a page times-out or just fails to load, but also periods when response from the server is quite good. Due to the high volume of attempted SPAM attacks on the forum, I have switched to a semi-manual sign-up checking process. Unfortunately this may lead to some delays in confirming registrations. This process is under review and may change in future. If you have any problems registering then please send a follow-up message via the Contact form. Some addtional content for the information pages has been done, but otherwise not many changes. Website performance problems continue to be the major outstanding issue. This is caused by very slow access to the MySQL database server at various times. The issue is extremely erratic – during quiet times of the day performance is pretty good, but at other times it often so slow that the page display times-out. This causes either a blank page to to be shown or sometimes a connection error. The problem has been confirmed by the hosting company and they are working on a solution. The Wordpress Super Cache plugin has been installed and this helps a bit when showing pages that have not been changed. Unfortunately this will not help at all when writing a new post or accessing admin functions, in fact it might even make things worse! This is one of the disadvantages of low cost shared hosting. So it’s really a case of waiting until the hosting company improve the situation. A few more changes done. Gradually getting the hang of the various software components being used. Settled on using the Atahualpa Wordress theme – easily the most configurable, without hacking the php code too much. Taking a while to find out how to use all the options, but that’s its strenghth - a lot of things are possible! Forum is now sitting better in the Wordpress page, after a bit of php surgery. Found some compatiblity issues between some Wordpress plugins and WP-United. Several problems solved by reading through the WP-United forum. Contact form is now working. The WPU login widget is much better than the original Meta widget. Widget-Context plugin is really useful for managing sidebar content on specific pages. I’ve had enough of the cold winter and waiting for spring now! At last there are signs of the first sping bulbs. This winter seems to have gone on for a long time. The snow was beautifull looking – buy oh what a pain all round.  scenic but difficult! Didn’t see much help from the council with our side-roads. Thankfully many of the neighbours got stuck in and kept our road manageable throughout. Well done to all. This total re-work of the Earley Residents website has been assembled using several open-source components. Most notably WordPress and phpBB, all hooked together with WP-United. Why? – well I wanted a ‘Web 2.0′ type framework and this gave the most immediately acceptable solution. A single general-purpose CMS would have been nice, but there were a number of technical hosting issues. Wordpress and phpBB are very popular and mature platforms with lots of support from its developers and users. Both are database driven, which means there are some performance problems, especially due to running on low-cost shared hosting. Only time will tell if this outweighs the advantages over more simple methods. This is my first post Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging! |
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