OP upgrade work is underway

Although it may be down the totem pole in your interest list given the number of interesting political happenings of late, I just wanted to give everyone a quick update about the OP upgrade currently underway. I have been working with Ruby over the past several months to implement a much-needed upgrade of this site from Drupal 5 to Drupal 7.

The numerous iterations of the site have created some difficulties. For those of you who have been following OP for the nearly ten years it has been online probably recall some of these previous version, including a stint on Wordpress and MoveableType. Without going into a lot of technical detail, there are some tables in the database which holds all of the site’s data which need to be adjusted in order to work correctly with the upgrade script to move to the new version. It is vitally important to make sure that everything was imported correctly and works smoothly before we make the permanent switch to the newer version, so we’ll be doing a good bit of testing before the switch is pulled.

This will be the fourth major upgrade for this site, and although it is the first to stay on the same platform, upgrading across two major releases is no small task. Drupal 5, upon which the site is based, was first released over six years ago, and though it has been a strong base, it is beginning to show its age, and many of the cool features which could be implemented require plugins which no longer support this older software.

Ruby and I have set up a regular meeting schedule, and I hope to give some updates soon about the progress which has been made. Thanks everyone for your patience, and I hope that very soon you’ll get to see the fruits of our labor!