New design, website updates, forum and server upgrades underway

[Fuzz]

Hey guys! Hope everyone is well.

Just a heads up that I will be temporarily closing the site in the next few hours. It will be down for 12-24 hours depending on how smooth everything goes - which I will outline below… going to do A LOT of house cleaning, upgrades, etc…

I wanted to post this so some of you could catch it before the password protection pop-up starts showing up and you weren’t like WTF??? I will also post something on FB and Twitter about it… as I am planning on becoming more “social” haha! Going to use those more often anyways for site news, announcements, etc… Cesar, Andro and the rest of you that help are truly awesome - honestly what has kept TFF together all these years. Hopefully these new updates will help get more activity back to the site.

Some of you may or may not have known but I have been working on a new design for TFF on-and-off for about a year now. I have neglected it for far too long so it feels good to finally knock this out! It was in dire need of improvements on MANY levels... the biggest was the site wasn't mobile responsive which is ludicrous in 2016 and it is really hurting our overall SEO on search engines, especially since almost 50% of traffic is now mobile! I always stress how important mobile friendliness is at work and to my clients, so it feels good to get TFF back up to speed in that department.



The new look isn't a HUGE design change, but a much more polished version of what we have now but of course - mobile friendly. However, I took this opportunity to do quite a few other things. Since I am a sucker for bulleted lists and for anyone interested, here we go…

• All game sections have updated graphics, information, release dates, media and the sorts... I added over 30 NEW game sections of the lesser known FFs and all of the new ones that I have neglected to add since like 2013! So this just gets us back up to speed. Games are cross-linked better to related games and I fixed tons of dead links and removed inaccurate information.
• Created seven ‘Final Fantasy Game’ indexes that sort the titles by release dates, platforms, regions, etc…
• I tried to think of ways to integrate the main site more with the forums, so a few things done there, in particular to the game sections, was adding two new buttons.
  
  • Follow Game: Clicking this will either prompt the user to register/login - or - if you are already logged in, the button will just go from disabled to enabled and remain highlighted anytime you visit that particular section again. I use jQuery in the background (so no page refresh) that basically sends a query to the forum database to ‘subscribe’ the user to that game’s associated forum. So it will show up under their ‘Settings’ on the forums and they get notified on new posts, etc… Some issues with this as there are a ton of games that ‘share’ the same forum, but I got around that by searching for a keyword in the post title/body… but something I wanted to talk over with the other admins.
  • In Collection: Clicking this will again prompt the user to register or login, otherwise it will just enable the button and silently ADD that game to your forum user profile… This also works the other way around as now there are 2 new profile fields in the forums to select which FF games you own. Again, this isn’t 100% flushed out, just something to help bridge the site/forum.
  
  
• More integration into the core forum files. Notice now you can login directly from the main site to see unread messages and other user information - which we can add to.
• All of the code has been rewritten and optimized to kingdom come - although I will continue to do that after the new site goes live as I couldn't use all of my usual web development tools and auditors on the development server.
• New monthly polls
• More visible ways for users to submit content/contribute
• Updated PHP to 5.6
• Going to upgrade to latest release of vBulletin (4.2.3), which just fixes bugs and security issues, but supposed to run fast with newer versions of PHP.
• Uninstall vbSEO plugin and getting a new plugin to help manage/improve forum visibility on search engines.
• Installing 2 new mobile themes to the forums.
• Going to clean up the dark theme, update the logo and tighten things up… same with the Light theme.

I believe that is it, or at least the bigger things. If you guys have anything you want me to look at, fix or add to the site or forums, please let me know! Now is the time!

As always, thanks to you all for keeping this place alive.
Rock on.
Fuzz