New Hao Hao Report

Posted June 16th, 2008 by Ryan

As may be noticed, we've changed things up some around here. The Hao Hao Report is at the beginning of making a major transition to a completely new webware backend. The tech-minded among you may have known that the Hao Hao Report, since its inception, has utilized an open-source project called Pligg. Though Pligg holds its own, and has become the go-to Digg-like CMS - I've never been pleased with the development roadmap. Updates are few and far between, upgrades are painful and often involve major rewriting of templates, and code hacks are frequently the only solution to bugs that arise. This isn't to say Pligg is not on the path to improvement. The project has a stable v1 planned and code has been started for v2. However, that the project is still in "beta" after two and a half years of development leads me to believe if and when v1 an v2 are released, they will be equally slow in updating. Coupling this with a desire I've had in recent months to run a project off of the highly-acclaimed Drupal CMS, I've gone ahead and jumped ship from the Pligg camp and we are now fully migrated over to a Drupal-based system. ## So what's this mean for you? Well, a few things:

A new design - which will be undergoing additional tweaks as time permits.
New features - The new framework brings with it a sophisticated and stable set of new features. Give me a bit of time to sort through them and I promise some interesting things to come.
Better spam protection - The final straw with the old system was its shoddy spam protection. It required me, several times a day, to clear through the newly submitted stories and cull the crap. Due to solid built-in spam protection, this wont be as much a problem going forward.

## But... There's always a "but". I'm sorry to report that the migration didn't go as smoothly as I'd have liked, and though I've saved all user submitted data - you'll find that your password may not work, and that your photo is missing. Thankfully, these are both easy to fix problems. Simply use this quick form to re-set your password, and once logged in, you can re-upload your image (and fill out the new "About", "Site" and "Country" profile fields). Well, that about sums it up. Please excuse any choppy sailing over the next couple weeks as we shake and break everything around here putting the new system to the test. If you notice any bugs, let us know: info@ the site you're at. Regards, Ryan McLaughlin