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2020 - PHP 7 Compatibility

I suddenly found that I had a lot of work to do on the site at one point after upgrading the SFXB forum.

The upgrade process warned me that the new version of PHPBB needed PHP 7.x.
The server was running 5.x at the time, so I switched PHP versions in cPanel and proceeded with the upgrade.

Unfortunately, all the MySQL functions that the site was using were removed from PHP 7.

For a couple of days, the site ran without the forum, while I was re-writing parts of the site and switching back-and-forth between PHP versions to test the fixes.
It was tricky to know whether you were making progress and had fixed any given part of it, since everything needs to work to stop it from erroring out altogether.

In any event, the re-work of the site was done in 2 days, rather than the several days that was originally budgeted.

2019 - CMS Integration with Facebook

News Integration

With v9.9, I made the site's news system display my stuff from Facebook alongside other news articles.
All the system requires is that a news article be created and the content's unique Facebook ID/fbid be entered into the relevant field. From there, the system uses Facebook's JavaScript SDK to display the content within a 'div' tag.

More info is available on the forum.

This feature was taken out in early 2021. All content on facebook was transferred to the site and re-integrated into the CMS.

2015 - SFXB Forum Move and Conversion

Ikonboard SFXB Forum

In Jan 2015, the SFXB forum encountered a software problem. So we moved the data to xbomber.co.uk and did a custom migration from Ikonboard to phpBB3.
Thanks to Andy Thomas for his help on the project, which was completed on 22nd Feb 2015.

More info is available on the forum.

2014 - Disappearance of Big Dai-X

Shane Perry's Big Dai-X website

In Nov 2007, Shane Perry re-created the Big Dai-X website under the domain bigdaix.co.uk, after the site went missing from bigdaix.com towards the end of 2004.
Thanks to my hosting situation with Peter and Dreamhost, I was able to host Big Dai-X on the same server as xbomber.co.uk.

In late 2013, the bigdaix.co.uk domain name expired. 
Since the files were safe on the server, but were inaccessible without the domain name, I decided to integrate the content (with acknowledgments) into the Star Fleet section of xbomber.co.uk so that everything could be accessed from a single menu system.
This integration was completed on 20^th June.

2014 - Move back to Krystal Hosting

Peter Lewis hosted us on Gibbering.net since 2007. This made looking after the website a lot simpler and let me focus on some technical aspects of the game. 
Because of the amount of disk space and bandwidth available, I was also able to make much more content available online.
Peter supported me a lot in 2008 when the project encountered legal problems.

In March 2014, Dreamhost deleted Peter's data and hiked the cost of his renewal.
So, I uploaded the file structures and database for xbomber.co.uk and bigdaix.co.uk to Krystal Hosting in the UK.

Stewart Dalzell at Krystal Hosting was very helpful and installed a custom php.ini to get the SLIR image resizer working.

2012 - Media System

Images - Version 1

Before the Media system was completed, images and other files were displayed in the following locations:
	- The xbomber.co.uk website
	- The Coppermine-driven X-Archive collaborative gallery
	- ImageVue X2-driven X-Bomber the Game screenshot gallery

Each of the above locations had their own, separate file structure.
They had no consistent layout or appearance and no integration. Administration of the different systems was time-consuming. 

The content from the above structures was merged and the Media system was written in PHP to index the content and display it within the xbomber.co.uk website.
With the Media system, large amounts of content can be uploaded over FTP and the system takes care of the rest. 
The system was completed in October 2012, marking the release of v9 of the website.

Thanks to Lord Ri for his help with creating the system. It took that and a lot of visits to Stack Exchange to get the thing working.

The Media system was originally known as Images. It became known as Media when its functionality was expanded to index the website's gameplay videos in December 2012.