Commenting is back, this time based on the Disqus cloud based commenting system. Plone does provide a fairly reasonable commenting infrastructure, however I couldn't find an easy way of turning it on for database item entries which weren't written to support individual commenting, so I simply took the easy option and hacked in the disqus support javascript into the database item entry display TAL. I then installed a Plone plugin which replaces the default commenting system with Disqus across the site, and problem solved.

Last thing needing fixed is calculating the leaderboard. I'm not sure what to do here ... I'd like some text up front explaining the selection criteria, but haven't figured out how to do this quite yet. I'm getting there though :)

The leaderboard is back and fully working. Site is fully restored, enjoy!

The database has been restored, though not only are all the old comments gone but so has the ability to add new comments.

I'm working on restoring commenting, so please do bear with me.

The other thing is that for obvious reasons the links are all borked too what with the data storage change, so these will need fixing up probably manually. Also, right now the leaderboard shows nothing as presently it has no concept of which is a leaderboard item as yet.

This is coming soon though, so watch this space ...

Unfortunately during the port of this site from Plone v3.3 to Plone v4.0 the custom content type we used to represent the dedicated server entries refused to function. Rather than try too hard to fix this, we decided we ought to really bite the bullet and upgrade the entry database to something less hacky and more proper such that - god forbid - if we ever wanted to change the field design we simply could.

To that end we have made a significant start using a proper database design - the database currently has one test entry in it, and not everything is 100% working yet. But we hope to get all the entries restored by tomorrow and even currency conversion working again.

Unfortunately in the process of replacing the old data type, any non-core data attached to it has been lost i.e. all your comments. We do apologise for this - however, more than 80% of them were spam (you never saw these because we moderate all comments) but it was becoming a real pain in the ass to delete all these each day. This upgrade to Plone v4.0 fixes all those problems, not least that we now have OpenID support and a whole new commenting and discussion system which is vastly superior, not least that it supports some limited HTML and formatting now.

So do bear with us, and thanks for your patience. We'll be fully back soon!

Finally got the time to migrate the servers over to Plone 4 which is a fairly hefty undertaking. Servers will be read only 16th to the 17th April 2011.