CCC Website Migration

Those familiar know that the current incarnation of the CCC website was developed a decade ago. The software and language it’s written in are wildly outdated, far past end of life, and no longer supported with no direct (or indirect really) upgrade path.

While the plan for replacement has been a detailed roll-out, and under development for the last year, our current hosting provider will be upgrading their own platform out from underneath us.  I have also previously tested a similar upgrade, with catastrophic results, so the outcome there is fairly dire.

That leaves us with two choices if we were to keep the current website: investing additional resources attempting to retest the entire website and attempt to resolve issues, or migrate the current website to a new hosting platform (that itself is willing to run outdated and vulnerable platforms). Both of which require significant work, and detract from the ongoing development on the new website, near to completion. And any work put into any maintenance of the old web site is wasted; there’s no way to maintain that site indefinitely.

Or, we manage the project and complete the website migration which is planned for this Fall anyway. At this point the replacement site is already up and running well past development mode. 99% of the current site content is migrated from the old site to the new site, and all core functions and features are in place. Several people have helped test those features and functions (in particular, the webmaster long before me, Chuck Brabec, who’s done a spectacular job at providing detailed feedback, and Bob Brueckner, who has provided a newspaperman’s eye). Other CCC officers have already begun testing the features that relate to their offices. We already know that all users will have to reset their passwords. Then again, many of you can’t seem to remember it anyway 🙂

One risk in in that migration not functioning as planned. Right now very little traffic is being processed through the website (thanks Covid!).  We have the email list, Meetup, and Facebook as alternate methods of communication.Typically < 10 people / month renew their memberships over the months of September to December. We have backups of the memberships, and can always run them manually directly through Paypal. We aren’t actually planning long-term events.

Another risk is that some of the shiny new functionality will have to be deferred to implementation after the migration is complete in order to get everything ready in time. That means the future implementations of those features will be closer to the production website. All of those I think we can manage.

And, of course, we have a (fortunately mostly non-contentious) vote that now runs right through the middle of that. Never fear – there’s a plan in place for that as well.

Often these events bring rise to a clamor of volunteers (well, a couple anyway) interested in helping. Each of those volunteers in turn costs time to include them in the development and testing process, and we don’t have a lot of spare time! If you have 10+ hours to commit to assisting in the next couple of weeks, I welcome providing you more information.

Bear with us as we move forward. If all goes well, the migration will happen in early October. The CCC is an all-volunteer organization but we’ve got some of the best volunteers around! And I know we have the best members willing to work with us as we work out the kinks.

Thanks everyone.

Rick Steeves, Webmaster