George P posted:Its not set in stone Julian.
We were able to set-up the home page art work prior to the migration. I was able to place the old forum and new forum side by side on my computer screen, and set them up to look as close to identical as possible. That was the easy task.
But the various forum pages weren't viewable in their finished state until after the data was migrated from the old forums. However once the data is migrated the new forums have to go live, we couldn't go back to using the old forums while I finished "tweaking" the art work of the new forums, because the old forums would collect additional "un-migrated data".
So the final appearance of the forum pages has to be sorted-out with the forums live. The old forums are no longer available to use as a comparison ... but that's not much of a drawback because the lay-out is different. But the software is all new so I have to go through the process of determining what changes what.
We went through this back in 2006. I promise we'll sort it out again. I'm the biggest problem slowing the process down.
I have member profile/registration particulars to sort out too.
Great that things are up and running again, almost got withdrawal symptoms. We sure appreciate the time and effort you are putting into getting it optomised.