V-Flyer - Affinity
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- Pete Shaw
- Jr. Rocketeer
- Posts: 46
- Thanks: 0
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Site Name: V-Flyer
URL/Link: www.v-flyer.com
Concept: A community for passengers of Virgin-branded travel companies
Extensions: JomSocial, RokBridge & phpBB3, PHP Pages (for all the Toolbox items)
Category: Travel
Template: Affinity (both for Joomla and phpBB3)
V-Flyer is an established website which I originally created in ASP/VBScript on a Windows server with a Snitz forum codebase back in 2003. Like most sites, it organically grew like a birdsnest, and although I knew I needed to eventually move it off of a dead-end technology like ASP, it wasn't going to be easy; but this project taught me a few techniques of how to migrate and make the experience seamless for the 4000+ registered users.
For instance, both Snitz and Joomla use one-way encryption of passwords. Sadly it's not the same type of encryption, so you can't just copy it across, and the suggestion often cited for this scenario is to reset all the user passwords - not something I wanted to do. In the end, the simple solution was to create an extra column in the jos_users table, put the Snitz password in that and then modify the authentication plug-in so it compared a password entry against that using SHA256, and if it matched, re-write the entered password into the password field using Joomla's salted MD5. To the user it's totally transparent.
Most of the migration went via Excel, and I used a lot of VLOOKUPs to convert the forum_id's, new user_id's and generally keep it all together. In all, about 230,000 individual posts were transferred, with very little broken in the switchover. I've also hacked phpBB about a bit to customise it for our particular requirement for Trip Reports and Itineraries, so it shows ratings and route maps.
The site now focuses on three core areas; The forum for threaded discussion. The community (JomSocial) section for more informal social discussion and photo sharing. And the toolbox for the bespoke travel tools I've written (facilitated by PHP Pages extension) to do things like Flight Status and drawing great circle routes between airports.
Users love the new look, and thanks to the RocketTheme template the site is much cleaner and easier to navigate than it ever was in the past. I should also give a nod to Rochen Hosting too, who I switched to with V-Flyer in mind. Even though I'm throwing some particularly hairy code at them (for example, live maps showing the position of all Virgin Atlantic aircraft), there servers seem to cope with ease, and the support from Rochen has been second to none. Can't recommend them enough.
Pete
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