[Bf-webcontent] The change last weekend

[Bart Veldhuizen]

Hi group,

here's a quick note with some background on the change of last  
weekend. We were experiencing two problems last weekend: first,  
xserve (the server on which blender.org and blender3d.org run) was  
having spontaneous reboots in the middle of the night. We're not sure  
why, but it's still running an old version of OS X (10.2). The idea  
is that xserve will be completely reinstalled and upgraded to Tiger  
(10.4) somewhere this week. That should help matters.

Second, blender.org was hacked and defaced. This was not the first  
time and we were pretty fed up with postnuke and it's security  
problems. So, on saturday we made the choice to get rid of it  
altogether and move everything into Typo3. This is a plan that we  
have been having for almost a year now and everyone was afraid of  
starting. Anyway, if you've ever worked with Ton you know how these  
things go: Ton, Timothy and I worked all weekend to pull this off.  
Typo3 now has a news extension built in, the old forum data has been  
converted into a vanilla phpBB installation and at the very end we  
slapped the new Blender3d.org design on the homepage because Ton felt  
we should give our users something new to look at.

We're still not finished: there's plenty of broken links (if you find  
them, please fix them!), the Verse pages need to be moved into Typo3  
and I'm still not 100% happy with the way the news items look. Also,  
Matt, the designer of the new look, was only 10% ready with his  
design. We'll hopefully do a full re-implementation of all the  
templates (this time *fully* XHTML-CSS-P based) somewhere in the next  
few months and rearrange all the content so that it makes more sense.

So, sorry for not informing you guys sooner but things have been  
pretty hectic around here :)

Bart