The last few days regular visitors have no doubt noticed the new look at popdirt.com. It was long overdue to convert off the dinosaur that is php-nuke as the site’s platform, but the hassle and which alternative to select and what converters were available made me put it off. The old interface was riddled with poor coding issues, and now the setup is generally w3c compliant (embedded video is universally a problem in that regard), so errors shouldn’t be much of a problem anymore.
For those who signed up with the old top sites feature, that isn’t available in WordPress, so it unfortunately had to be sacrificed, sorry. Also there’s no function to submit news, but you can use the contact form to send items and I’ll review them for possible inclusion. Also gone are the previous comments and the existing users – the submitted stories have been manually altered so the credit was given to the original or anonymous author. Links are gone too, but most of them had expired as is typical with pop artist fan sites. The polls have been removed too, except the flash ones embedded in certain stories.
On the plus side, there’s now an ability to post comments as a guest (which are moderated), the site is available via mobile phone, the search function is better than php-nuke, and dead links that were frequent for old articles can now be detected automatically.
Converting the other sites over will probably be delayed until I get a faster server, as WordPress seems to use more resources than the old platform. When that’s done, features like related posts can be added.