Taiwan Ho! News

The next part of the upgrade is now complete with a new look Taiwan Ho! Connections page. Your old login details will work with this new look site and we hope it provides you with a more enjoyable user experience.

The latest from the forums feature has been added back to the front page today. Keep up to date with the discussion over at the forums and feel free to chip in at any time.

The feedback form is now back up and running. If you want to get in touch with us, the best way is to use the form which you can find at http://www.taiwanho.com/contact

The first draft of the new look front page is finally up at http://www.taiwanho.com

Instead of trying to finish the whole page first, I decided that we should at least have something up instead of the text message, and so we have.

The contact form will be up later today so you can actually get in touch, but if you have any comments you’d like to share, please post them here.

Before you ask, the staring out to sea guy will be replaced by a map of Taiwan. And the the boxes with titles will actually have articles – right now we are re-classifying and moving over 300 articles from the old database to the new one.

Cheers

Malcolm

Something that we really want to do with this version of the site is make the look consistent on all areas, keeping to our old colour scheme.

To this end, we are pleased to have the Taiwan Ho! theme for the forums up and running. We have purposefully kept the design as close as possible to the old one to keep it familiar to our readers, but there are a lot of extra features packed into the new forums software.

One of the most useful might be the “Save” feature, where you can save a draft of your post before making it live.

Another useful feature is the “View active topics” link on the top of the front page. This replaces the view posts from the last XX days function, but does the same job.

Please let us know what you think in the forums in this thread.

Keeping it simple – Malc

The latest section to be reinstated is the Taiwan Ho! Gallery. We have decided to make a new section with the new photos and software, but we had such a soft spot for the old photos that we decided it should come back.

As some of these photos are out of date, especially the pubs and restaurants section, please use this gallery as a reference only.

So for all who have asked, here is the link to the Di Hua St. Gallery, and the reason why I suspect it has been requested so often:

Hopefully you are enjoying your New Year’s break. The weather has been up to the usual standard, so we have been hard at work behind the scenes.

The big news today is that we have made the switch away from Hostway to HostExpress as the new resting place for the Ho! It will take up to 48 hours for the change to take effect, then we can replace the ip number with taiwanho.com

The forums are now in the final testing stage for phpbb3 (the software which runs the forums). It all looks good, but it is necessary for us to take the forums offline to ensure we keep all of the previous info intact for the upgrade. They will be back online on Tuesday, February 12th. Just in time for the return to work for many of us.

New software has now been found for the links site and gallery, so the old site will take form as the new incarnation as soon as we can.

We are now paying for articles, so if you would like to write for us, please contact us on info@taiwanho.com

If you are interested in being involved in any other way, please also get in touch via the same email address.

Taiwan Ho!

Malcolm

I know it’s been a long time, but this has been the most significant housecleaning session in the last decade. We are in the process of moving everything to a new host and our very own dedicated server.

We have been testing the new code for the Forums upgrade (phpbb3) and it looks good to go.

The front page has been totally redesigned using our own CMS system. It’s also CSS based for those who care, or at least it is at the moment. The finishing touches will be put on in the next few weeks so we can finally launch.

This section of the site now uses Wordpress and extra tweaks will be made as we near launch time.

The date we are targeting therefore is February 12th, which is just after the new year break here in Taiwan.

The site will go up bit by bit after that, with the focus on getting the articles back up first. We have a some excellent new articles ready to go up, and don’t forget we are now paying for every article published.

Looking forward to the next decade, Taiwan Ho!

Cheers

Malcolm