Welcome to the new Admin Blog on the freshly updated CTO site ....

We had been warning of an update for months and in the background we have been tweaking and testing the new version(s) of the software but as with any change, when we finally take the plunge it catches everyone by surpise ... including us. Its a little difficult in the middle of a season, in between games and such like, but we wanted to get this upgrade done as we have many other projects on the go and this one has been postponed a few times.

They say testing is boring, but in my working life it is an absolute necessity and it is something we have tried to bring to CTO any time we do even minor upgrades. We have tested this for the last 4-5 months but like clockwork, despite the testing, we always face challenges and this time was no different.

Our last test of the upgrade process went like clockwork ... we took a copy of everything and upgraded it on a test site in about 20 minutes, then spent about a week doing various configuration changes .... so we flipped the switch on boxing day when we hoped most users would be away from the Internet !

Holy **** !!! the site burped, farted and fell over ! The upgrade did not work !!! or should I say it half-worked .... ok, time to rollback, use the backup copy of everything and try again ... this time it did work ... or appeared to !!!! except when we tried to add articles and the titles werent displayed, or when we tried to view the gallery and the whole site went offline, or when we tried to convert articles from the previous WordPress install and everything imported but got totally screwed up and showed itself as a new topic .... 800 new topics in 5 minutes .. .thats got to be a record for us !

Its taken a couple of days, and it was probably good that we had a match today as it forced us to check a few things that were not working as expected and I think the major parts are now working as expected .... The editorial team can now add articles (once we show them how), the gallery doesnt crash the site, the RSS feeds now work, and article titles and such like now work ......

We were also acutely aware of the "sticker shock" for all of you guys who woke up to find a totally different site in front of you. We havent really had much comment yet ..... not sure if thats a good thing or a bad one, but for those comments and queries we do get over the coming days, weeks and/or months, we will try to answer them in here or in the forums.

The new site is progress and although it may not have all the bells and whistles of the previous site in terms of what we could do with the article system (Wordpess is awesome - we cannot deny it), the mere fact that we now have each part of the site integrated into a single entity makes it almost seamless to navigate and over time as we refine it, the experience will be a lot easier for us, you and the editorial or other teams.

Please use the Website Support forum to highlight any issues you may have with the site, whether its a technical one, or something that may not work as expected, or where colours might clash etc. or to request more information about how to use a certain function. We will hopefully try to use this blog to keep folk up to date on whats going on with site development and also to maybe highlight the odd tutorial for parts of the site that have changed .......