George asked me to make an announcement regarding what we are up to behind the scenes.
As you may (or may not) be aware, the EU last year passed guidelines aimed at protecting individual data privacy rights. Those guidelines are called “GDPR,” or General Data Protection Regulations. Our current forum software (Eve Community) is not compliant with the GDPR. Eve Community is an older platform that is no longer being updated or improved and therefore it shall never be compliant with the GDPR. So George has taken the lead in working with our forum provider, Social Strata, to migrate the forums to their most up to date forum platform, known as HOOP.LA. Migrating to HOOP.LA will not only make us compliant with the GDPR, but it shall also make the forums more "portable device" friendly. Finally, since HOOP.LA is Social Strata's latest product, a product under on-going development, we can look forward to having the forums supported by Social Strata way into the future.
The Pantera International website was developed almost two decades ago using website building software from Microsoft called Front Page. Front Page was superseded by other Microsoft products in 2006, the year George took the helm at Pantera International; its been obsolete a long time. Websites built with Front Page require proprietary "server plug-ins" called "FrontPage Server Extensions", rather than standard protocols like FTP and WebDAV. That was my biggest challenge in redesigning the website. Every change required contacting our web host's customer support and asking them to reload the "Front Page Extensions". If you notice the footnote on the website's home page, the last update occurred in 2016. This is because our web host's newest customer support employees aren't even aware of the existence of Front Page Server Extensions. Using Front Page has also made other features impossible to offer, such as a shopping cart and instant check-out for the De Tomaso Store. Our websites aren't mobile friendly either. Thus we could no longer put-off migrating the website software to one of the contemporary design tools; we chose Adobe Dreamweaver.
I began working on migrating the websites to Dreamweaver last year, I just finished the software for the Sespe website, I shall upload it later this week. That will be a big milestone for me. I've also begun working on Pantera International's website.
The website migration shall take place in phases, for two reasons.
First - The migration of the forums to HOOP.LA shall impact the design of the websites, but the extent of that is unknown to us at this time. HOOP.LA may require revisions to the art work of the forums and the artwork and software of both websites.
Second - I am unfamiliar with "Responsive Design" so I can't incorporate it into the websites at this time. Responsive Design has become a mandatory part of web design due to the use of portable devices, it makes a website easily viewable on different sizes of devices. Responsive design enables a web page to detect the visitor’s screen size and orientation and change the page's layout accordingly. Incorporating the elements of Responsive Design shall require further revisions at a later date.
George and I hope that within a year we'll be finished with this process and the websites and forums will be as contemporary to use and maintain as possible, that they shall be mobile device and PC friendly, that they shall incorporate features that you've come to expect, and that they are all operating on platforms that shall be supported far into the future.
Plus we're preparing for the Concorso next month. We're keeping busy.
If there's any questions please post them.
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