Wainuiomata.com

Posts tagged by website

Business and clubs directory

Posted on November 19, 2023 by: Rob van der Linde
Filed under: Announcements, Developments
Tags: business, wainuiomata, directory, clubs, website

You may have noticed an increased presence on our wainuiomata.com Facebook page, but that doesn't mean we stop on the website, far from it. Apart from the redesign planned over the next few months, I've been thinking about bringing the Business Directory we used to have on the old site back (rebuild), but also a separate Clubs area. Hopefully I won't be burning the candle too much from both ends but the design can be put off a few more months probably.

We realise that times have changed a lot since we last had a business directory. Back then we manually entered everything from a physical copy into the system, but these days there are a lot of different ways to get this data. Even Google has information about a business if you search for it by name.

Just about every club in Wainuiomata seems to have a Facebook page, some even only have a Facebook page or a broken website. So linking to their Facebook page is crucial.

We're using Wagtail and we can develop this sort of stuff pretty fast now. We want images and an image gallery possibility under clubs. It also should help with some smaller businesses who may not have budget to put up a good side of their own. In the past we've offered clubs their own website but we realise that this is taking on a lot of work, so offering a page on wainuiomata.com is the next best thing and it all becomes searchable too, as every page, post and comment is indexed on our site and refreshed every 5 minutes.

For now we will probably pre-seed all the data ourselves first, but in the future, I'm thinking businesses should be able to update their own page. There is no cost planned for this, we always want this to be free. The only requirement, must be a business or organisation or club in Wainuiomata only. So not Lower Hutt or Petone, Wainuiomata only.

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Website registrations

Posted on November 13, 2023 by: Rob van der Linde
Filed under: Announcements, Developments
Tags: wainuiomata, website

A while ago now we had to temporarily disable registrations on the website until we have better systems in place to manage spammers registering on the forum and posting spam.

Existing users can still log in, we have only temporarily disabled new user registrations until we have something to manage this better.

This website has been around for a very long time and most of the active userbase registered around 2005-2007 so if you have forgotten your password and somehow don't have access to your original email, don't hesitate to contact either myself or Shane to get that restored. Otherwise the self-service works too.

Meanwhile, we are well aware that the website doesn't work very well on mobile. It was made in a different time when mobile wasn't as big as it is today. A redesign is on the books and definitely needed. We acknowledge this is a problem that needs to be resolved.

Also don't forget to check out our Facebook page and if you are a local club in Wainuiomata that wants something shared, contact us.

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Initial forum load done

Posted on April 16, 2013 by: Rob van der Linde
Filed under: Announcements, Developments
Tags: forum, website

We've finally done it!  All the data from the old ynui.co.nz forum has been imported into the new website after weeks of hard work, that is all the threads, topics, comments, profiles, etc.

The new forum software has been uploaded to the wainuiomata.com site, but we will keep the old website running for a while until things have settled down.  The new forum (and the rest of the site) is written in Django, while the old website was written in PHP and was very different in design.

We did manage to keep things as similar as possible to the old forum design, so that the data could be imported without too much rework.

Please note that you can't login just yet, there are still a few things to sort out before we can enable people to login with their old ynui.co.nz accounts (as well as create new accounts) but hopefully this won't be too long.  The main thing is that the new forum is up, which is a huge milestone by itself.

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The forum is getting closer

Posted on April 13, 2013 by: Rob van der Linde
Filed under: Announcements, Developments
Tags: forum, website

We are getting closer now to completing the move of the old ynui.co.nz forum and all the existing posts and comments on the forum to the wainuiomata.com website.  There has been a great amount of work put into this project, rewriting the forum as it was on the old website, but in Django rather than PHP, so moving over a completely different system all together and converting the database to the new system.

I have put my best effort in making sure the old data (that is the posts, comments, and user profiles) are preserved when imported into the old system, by converting the data as it is imported and cleaning it where necessary.  This has been a huge undertaking but well worth it, I have run a simulation of the import many times now, and am confident that when the time comes everything should be imported without any issues.

There are only a few issues to resolve now, and I expect the move to be done within 1-2 weeks from now.

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