Cleveland Swings is about to undergo a major update/change. This is probably the largest update the site has ever gone through; it is even larger than last year's update. Here is a rundown of the relevant facts.

Why the change?

As many people have guessed, traffic to Cleveland Swings has dropped significantly over the past couple of years. According to my site statistics, site visits have dropped by about 50% over the past 2 years, while forum activity has declined much more. This is despite the fact that the size of the "real life" swing community has remained largely stable. There are many potential explanations for the decrease; I won't go into them. However, much of the site's original design was conceived before the advent of social networking, and I suspect that this has something to do with it.

For the past 6 months, I've been investigating ways that we can integrate Cleveland Swings with existing social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. The results of my investigation were discouraging: our current setup makes it very difficult to integrate the site with any of the popular social networking services. After sulking about this for a week, I decided that social networking integration had to move forward, and any changes we would have to make in the process were necessary.

What will change?

For this section to make sense, it may be wise to review how the site currently works. There is a wall of text below. I've bolded the most important parts for the non-geeks among us.

The biggest change that will take place is the removal/replacement of phpBB as our forum software. phpBB has been the main hurdle to social networking integration. Unfortunately, replacing phpBB is a pretty big change as Cleveland Swings has used phpBB for almost a decade. Even today, user accounts, private messages, and forum posts are all contained within phpBB. Replacing phpBB means replicating all these services. This is how we will do it:

• User Logins -- All user logins will be migrated to Joomla. This should happen without too much trouble, though slight changes will be made to SOME usernames. Joomla is a little more strict than phpBB when it comes to acceptable username. This shouldn't affect more than a handful of users, and more detailed information is forthcoming.
• User Profiles -- User profiles (like avatars, location, email address, etc) will be handled by a Joomla plug-in called "Community Builder." Community Builder is a very powerful plug-in, and will allow us to bring back some features that were lost last year (like our birthday list!). Unfortunately, existing avatars and profile information (other than username, email and password) will not survive the transition.
• Forums -- The Cleveland Swings forum will be handled by a Joomla plug-in called Kuena. While the look will be slightly different, Kuena is very similar to phpBB. All of the posts in our existing forums WILL be migrated to the new forums. This is already been tested, and it works great!
• Private Messages -- Private Messages will be handled by a Joomla plug-in called uudelim (I'm sure that means something to someone). It is very similar to our current private messaging system. Private Messages WILL NOT survive the transition. This is probably the biggest loss of the change, as I'm sure some people are keeping private messages dating back to 2004. To ease the transition, phpBB will remain online for a couple of months after the update. The forums will be read-only, but people can sort through and copy any private messages they need to save.

When will it happen?

Next week is my Spring Break, so I'll take the site down for a day sometime next week to make the changes.

What happens after that?

I'll wait a month or two for the initial batch of changes to shake down, and then we'll proceed with Facebook integration. I've already experimented with some of the available functions, and the potential is pretty exciting. You will be able to log in to Cleveland Swings using your Facebook account, and activity on Cleveland Swings will appear in your Facebook profile for discussion and comment.