Ideas for rebuilding the site

[Dragon]

For a while I've been wanting to learn one of the popular PHP frameworks. At this point my thoughts are really on CakePHP and Zend, leaning more toward Cake. Since those frameworks are about rapid development, I'm hoping to tackle multiple areas of the site with a rebuild. I've also noticed that the home page of the site hasn't been updating for a while. I'm not sure what's causing it yet and just haven't had time to look into it. Hopefully soon.

Of course, I'm also still part way into making another board-to-web game conversion, leaning more toward a Flash-based game. I know... that's a couple big jobs to tackle simultaneously. But I'm back home and anxious to get back to something normal... and that's been pretty normal for me for a while.

[TylerChuit]

Mmmmm.... cake... 

[Wyldwing]

The cake is a lie!
The cake is a lie!
The cake is a lie!

[Dragon]

I've been working my way through The Cookbook - the official manual for CakePHP. After spending a couple days on that and completing the first tutorial to set up a simple Blog system, I decided to search for some more information to get started. Reading through manuals is ok, but finding out things that actually work is much better. A quick search brought me to the site of the "Psuedocoder" Matt Curry and his free eBook of Super Awesome Advanced CakePHP Tips. So... I continue to fry by brain on these framework concepts.

[Dragon]

I decided today to tackle this a bit more realistically, starting with pointing the home page directly at the forum. This complete conglomeration is actually hosted between multiple domains, the oldest one being "DragonsHobbies.com" which is hosted with a different company than the one that handles a majority of the traffic on the site - that being on the forum. Apparently that host has changed some functions, causing that portion of the site to stop updating when it was supposed to. The workaround was fairly obvious - don't bother hosting the home page on a different server - just redirect to the real thing. So now, if I wanted this site to look like it did before, I'd just have to recreate a home page that did everything the other one did. Maybe I'll do that, but I'd like to do something that looks completely different, so I'd like to work on some new designs. It would definitely be good to do that again, don't you think?