Okay, so the goal was to have the site all ready to relaunch on Halloween. Today marks The Poet’s Haven’s 16th anniversary (not counting the two-or-so years before that where we operated as “The Haven” on AOL). Unfortunately, more complications arose while transferring the database from the old site. As of right now, there’s about 16 short stories that won’t transfer and will have to be reposted manually. I’ll have to figure out which ones they are. There’s also several other stories that aren’t displaying correctly due to WordPress’ CSS based formatting handling certain HTML coding differently than a plain HTML display like the old site had. I’ll have to fix them manually as well. I’ve also encountered some issues with line spacing that will have to be fixed site-wide. Several of my old blog posts have been removed as they were essentially double posts of podcast pages, and it just plain looked bad when browsing the site without any category filter turned on. All-in-all, the remaining issues to fix here won’t take too long. Oh, and while several new poems have been added to the site, there’s still about 90 more old submissions I need to decide on. That’s what I would have been finishing today, if the database transfers had not proven to be so problematic…
What WILL be a bit longer in the finishing is the new submission system. I’ve only been able to find one open-source based script for this purpose, and it will need quite a bit of rewriting and customization before it can be used here. It also hasn’t seen any updates from its original author(s) in several years, which might lead to the same problems with it as what happened with the old Poet’s Haven galleries. If you know of any open-source (or other no-money-needed licensing), PHP/SQL based submission management scripts, please let me know. I would like something that works like the Submittable site, only installed locally (on this server) and without needing either an annual fee or for authors to pay to submit work.