Warning! Techie article. No musical merit in this post whatsoever. Skip to the pertinent content…

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It has been a while coming and while I may be a web developer I tend to be a bit of a hack. When we moved over to the Wordpress backend from PHPBB I ended up doing some heavy standard file editing which is a no-no on these packages. The reason isn’t that it may break something, the reason is that you will have a hard time upgrading. Basically when an upgrade is done in Wordpress you overwrite all of your files with the new files then perform a database upgrade. In essence, overwriting ALL of the hacks you’ve done.

We haven’t really changed the way we do things, only this time around we’ve actually documented the files and changes that are needed to added the wonderful user extensions as well as Artist and Album tagging on posts. Nothing major but when you’ve got an entire site depending on the infrastructure you need to do it right.

What’s next…

We have a whole slew of plans moving forward. We were on a bit of a holding pattern with the onslaught of visitors during the Indie Of The Year contest but now that the contest is finished we’ll have some time to address. I won’t get into much detail about what plans are but I will reveal this, we are working on a micro-payment system for editorial reviewers. What does that mean for you as a “user”? You will want to prove your chops to us to get in on the editorial team! Start taking part in some of the comments and such throughout the site and most importantly, submit many user reviews. If we like what we see you will get a personal invite to join the team. We are so far behind on reviews we aren’t just looking for a couple. We’d like to expand to at least 10-15 full-time editorial staff to help out with reviews, blog posts, podcasts, posting artist bios and much more.

This micro-payment system has been on the table for quite some time but the resources haven’t been there to do the extra coding necessary in order to make it happen. Let me know your thoughts on this and what you might hope to see in such a system down in the comments below.

Thanks for your patience in this upgrade and please let us know via the contact form if you run into any bugs or glitches in the upgraded version.