Craig — That’s one of the big things I am looking for is a whole new forum engine. The forums here don’t allow anything more than plain text with some very basic HTML; no photos or anything else. I hate it. The forum is probably going to be the biggest change in the new site.

Mike — I don’t think there’s any API for that, but I’ll put it on the list to look into. I do like G+ communities however it didn’t take long to realize it’s not a replacement for our forums. That said, if there was some kind of integration that could be good. We’ll look into it.

Hendrick — Interesting point on the first-time-visitor. Thanks. Social network login is definitely on the list. The list on the left is there to quickly find recent entires because the search on here sucks. With a better way to find past entries, that list won’t be needed anymore. So yes, I will get rid of it and replace with search that works. And, I’d never seen Tweakers.net before but I gotta say… really?! I don’t think it’s attractive at all. I’ll definitely spend more time on it to see what I may be missing, but that surprises me. And I’m glad you like photojoseph.com, thanks. I’m still tweaking that one too and there are things I don’t like about it however Squarespace 6, while awesome, is extremely limiting. Basically you pick a template and can barely change it (unlike Squarespace 5, which this site is on, that’s very customizable). On my photojoseph site, I love love LOVE the portfolio. However the blog element is only ok-ish, and I hate the side column but can’t remove it. If I pick a theme with no side column, I can’t use that portfolio page. *sigh*

Thanks again all… keep the input coming!!

AJ Jack & Thomas — Yep, quite familiar with Wordpress, however I’m leaning towards Drupal. I will not be doing this myself; I have no interest in becoming a site engineer and accept that as part of the growth of ApertureExpert. I’d rather be writing tutorials than figuring out yet another web design system! Drupal is harder to use but is ultimately most customizable, and if I’m going to redo this site, I’m going to redo it right.

Thomas — Actually the Apple forums are my gold-standard model. Even those could be cleaner but they do offer all the power that I want in here. The forum is usually the most active part of this site, and ironically it’s the most basic. But yes the forums will be MUCH more robust than they are now.

Scott — It’s funny you say that. When I first launched this site, I pretty much went max width for common Mac screens, but the screens grew! Whatever we do will absolutely be more mobile friendly, more fluid (I think “liquid” is a common term) so that it formats beautifully on any platform. I can’t promise that it’ll always fit the max width of any screen but hopefully we can close to that. Remember though that I can’t lock in the width at too wide, or folks on smaller Macs won’t be able to see the full thing. As for platform, surprisingly 25+% of my traffic comes from Windows, and another 7+% “unknown”; most likely people viewing the site while at work or just from a second computer (obviously all users have Macs). Plus at least one chap on a Playstation Portable ;-)

Walter — Thanks for your input. Some great examples of fluid sites there, those are fantastic! I’ll go through all of those looking for ideas. And yes that’s exactly the sort of thing I have in mind. I personally move between an 11” MacBook Air, a 27” iMac, my iPad and iPhone constantly, and so can appreciate a site that handles that well. And to be fair this site as it is now, while it does not change format at all, does actually do quite well on all of those devices and screen sizes. I pride myself on picking a good size for things when I started, and adapting to HiDPI graphics quickly and where possible (not all screenshots are high enough rez to begin with), but it’s time to grow up.

Legacy content will all be there. My engineer has been looking through things and at this point is confident we can migrate all text, images and comments in the tips (this page) and retain all existing URLs. Comments will probably close on those, but the content will all be there. The forums are a little trickier but the content will still be there. It’s exceedingly important to me that there is no data lost. This site is a treasure trove and I’m not about to give all that good stuff up!

Just FYI, I didn’t pick the platform and then look for an engineer; it went the other way around. I met the guy I’m using through another project and his preferred platform is Drupal. If he told me that hand coding in HTML 1 was the way to go, I’d probably listen. Just kidding.

I appreciate the offer of assistance, and will keep it in mind :)

John — I’ve spoken with Squarespace extensively, both before and after the release of Ss6. I’ve had many conversations with, well, someone senior and they know that I can’t move this site to Ss6, understand what’s lacking in Ss5, and basically can’t offer much. They are very secretive about the future and I think to their discredit, have adopted an Apple-like approach to new features (i.e. near-zero communication). I’ve waited two years for the forums to get better, and they haven’t changed at all. I do love Ss6 and it does offer many of the features I want, but without really good forums, DOA to me. And frankly the lack of control in Ss6 doesn’t fit with how I need to do things on this site. It’s really, really nice for my photo blogs, but just not enough for this business.

And I’ll look into Statamic, thanks.

Keep the comments coming!
-Joseph