Site Updates

It's been quite a while since there was a major overhaul of the Cooler Crew Site. The time has come for one. The software we've been running on, Drupal 7, was originally planned to go end of life several years ago, before the Covid pandemic, in fact. Even before the pandemic struck, the maintainers had pushed that end of life date off into the future, but the pandemic hadthem continuing to push it forward. 

 Its immediate successor, Drupal 8, was first released on November 19, 2015. This upgrade represented a major architectural change to both the software and the upgrade process. Unlike the upgrade from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7, which was comparatively simple, upgrading from 7 to 8 was, rather than being an in-place upgrade, going to be a migration. Content on the site would end up broken into smaller and smaller pieces for storage, and each piece of code was expected to perform its own migration. Given that the "important" content on this site is the supply of treasure hunt information, and I wrote a lot of code to enable all of the treasure hunt pieces, writing these migrations was not a trivial task, and so, as the end of life date kept getting pushed off, I also continued to push off the migration process.

In June of 2021, was the pandemic was winding down, the Drupal organization announced that Drupal 8 was being deprecated (it went EOL on November 2, 2021). Its own successor, Drupal 9, had been released on June 3, 2020, and it represented a potentially breaking change to how site configuration was managed. Drupal 9 reached the end of its life cycle on November 1, 2023, having been maintained alongside of Drupal 10 since its release on November 15, 2022. And oh yeah, the Drupal organization announced that the end of life to the software we've been using will be a non-negotiable, non-extendable January 5, 2025. 

So now, we had a jump from across 3 versions of the underlying software. Fortunately, I had started to write the migration code late in the Drupal 9 release cycle, so only minor changes were needed to move it to the current version of the Drupal. After a few test runs earlier on, and a couple more since the wind-down of the Winter 2024 treasure hunting season, I got to thinking that the only thing I had left was to make the site under Drupal 10 look as close as I could to the way it looked under Drupal 7. Fortunately making cosmetic changes to a web site is much simpler than making data structure changes, so after getting it "good enough" I decided to pull the trigger and make the changes. 

The result is what you see here. As I write this there are 3,826 pages on this site, that consist of treasure hunts, blog posts, newspaper articles, forums, and various other pieces of information. The underlying data has migrated over successfully. I took advantage of the migration process to make the hundreds of photo slide shows from various newspaper articles properly functional. But doing that means that there's a lot of content that I need to touch in order to make them fit the mold. 3,826, of them to be exact. 

I also made changes to how the various treasure hunts are organized, internally anyway. These changes made pages for the approximately 200 different treasure hunt types obsolete. Part of this process of touching each of those pages involves unpublishing them, so that I can repurpose the nodes (Drupal-speak for a piece of content) within the site for other uses. I don't like having gaps in the database for the node sequence numbers. This page, in fact, is taking the place of the page that formerly listed the Allison Wonderland Mock Hunt page. That part involves some database changes on my part, just to keep things clean. 

I'm about 626 pages into the whole process, out of 3,826. I've got a bit to go. But its going rather quickly. Until its done, there are certain things that may not work as well as I'd like. The menu items may not work. Treasure Hunt lists may not populate, but if there's something you're specifically looking for, you can always hit the search button in the top right corner of the site to look for it. As the guy who brings in most of the content in the site, I have to say I rather enjoy the tools that are behind the scenes for editing pages. And going forward moving to a new version of Drupal should be a lot easier for me. Hopefully you won't even notice it. 

Hopefully I'll be done touching everything that needs to be touched before the Summer hunting season kicks off. I've got a few that I want to find this year, and all I want to do here is copy clues into the respective pages. 

Because now that Drupal 10 has been released and available for 15 or so months, I'm going to have to get ready for Drupal 11's planned release in early December.

I'll let you know with another post when I'm done messing with the content. It will be soon. Until then, I probably know about things that may be problematic for you, so there's no need right now anyway to let me know if you see a problem.

And always remember:

Coolerheads will prevail!

Every year, I try to make at least one improvement behind the scenes to the Cooler Crew site. Over this past year, we've added in as many of the small-town treasure hunts as we could get our hands on into the site. This has involved a lot of googling and other tracking down of articles from smaller newspapers, contact with the folks who run the various hunts, etc. As of right now, we have 633 distinct pieces of content on the site, dating back to some of the original writings of Greg Sax back in 1999, and including all of the hunts we know of that took place in 2013. I hope to keep that particular tradition up. I'm also in the process of trying to make the url names of each of the individual pages more consistent, something along the lines of content_type/source/year/name. 

On the back end of things, I'm tweaking the code that powers the treasure hunt section of the site. One of the more prominent things you'll notice is the addition of a Google Map to the hunt information section of the treasure hunt pages where we have GPS coordinates for the location of that particular treasure hunt. On that same note, I'm working to change the way the summary maps work on the site. As of right now, the summary map pages, e.g., the Pioneer Press Treasure Hunt map are relatively static. Yes, they update based on hunts being added, but the underlying database structure isn't very conducive to maintenance, and all of the boundary data for cities, and hunt location data are sent to you, regardless of whether they're visible in the map you're looking at or not. I'm working to change that.

Finally, I'm actually working on a replacement for our forum. I think its kind of obvious that with Facebook, there are a lot of people who can't justify the $10 per year to maintain their membership at Able Minds. The last post in the Cooler Crew boards at the time I write this took place on September 25, nearly three months ago. A while ago, I started a conversation with many of you on Facebook just as a brainstorming place. I got a lot of good ideas from that. While I can guarantee that there won't be a forum hosted on coolercrew.com for the 2014 hunt, I'd really like to have something in place for the 2015 hunt. Don't be surprised if you see invites from me to test out a development site sometime over the summer. As for the history at Able Minds, well, you know we've got our boards from 1998-2005 archived here. I'm working to get the Ableminds content archived here too (as well as to keep it updated as people post). 

Oh and don't forget, with an account, you can create content here too. At the moment that's the only reason you need an account. As a result, accounts can now only be administratively created. When the forum comes online, you'll need an account for that as well. Until then, if you don't have an account, and would like one, follow the contact us link below and we'll set you up. We've done a major purge of "inactive" accounts, so if you had one before, or even thought you had one before, you might not now. Once the forum is back online, account creation will be re-enabled.

We are pleased to unveil to the general populace the new and improved Cooler Crew web site. There are some exciting new changes going on around these parts and we're glad you're a part of it.

The first thing you'll notice is the new look. After a decade of static web pages and a pseudo-content management system ares put together over the last few years, the site has implemented Drupal for managing the content. After spending a bit of time trying to work out a theme for it, the testers who provided feedback agreed that the "default" theme looks cool, so we're sticking with it.

One of the benefits of Drupal is that Coolerheads near and far will be able to submit their own news items to appear in the site. The Cooler Crew site has always depended on you to create the content you see here, and with the new software, that task is easier than ever to accomplish. Coming down the pipe, we're expecting to have an online photo gallery for you to submit your treasure hunt pictures to, as well as the ability to create your own blogs.

As always, the content of the site will be freely available. However, in order to create content, you'll have to sign up for an account on the site, but that's free and painless. And for those of you who have contributed material in the past, once you get signed up, we can attribute to you all that should be attributed to you, beyond just having a by-line in the story. Until then, well, let's just say we bring back an old name to be the nom-de-plume of everything not otherwise claimed, one Mr. Joe Medallion.

The Cooler Crew Forum at AbleMinds it is. Kitch allowed his WowBB site to expire, and I've disabled the phpbb site I had here, although the database and all its contents still exist. Who knows if and when it might be necessary again.

Update: 13 June 2005

A forum has been established at PeoplesForum's hosting provider, AbleMinds. This will likely end up being the permanent discussion home of the Cooler Crew

Updated 7 June 2005

According to the notice at http://pf.ableminds.com/, pf is likely going to be down all day. Check out one of the sites linked to below for alternatives.

3 June 2005

Given that peoplesforum.com is on its last legs (for those that don't know, the hosting provider of the site is planning on shutting it down come the end of June), updates will be placed here throughout the month as to where the discussion board will be moved to, and what software will be used for the site. If anyone has any suggestions for discussion board software or hosting sites, by all means, let me know, especially if the discussion board does end up here. Personally, I'm partial to the phpbb software. Kitch has suggested the WowBB software.

Rest assured that I've gone about archiving everything that we had at peoplesforum, and am planning on dumping it all into a database for future reference. (quite possibly, the old archives will be split up on a post by post basis and dumped into this same database). Until that time, THX has gathered everything from shoot the breeze and the medallion hunt threads in their HTML glory that can be used for archival purposes.

If, for some reason peoplesforum goes down unexpectedly, check either on the Cooler Crew web site or at the interim discussion board at http://coolercrew.mywowbb.com/ or at http://www.coolercrew.com/forum/.

Thanks to everyone that is helping with the article archive project. We've accomplished a lot, but there's plenty more to do! A mailing address is the only thing needed to get on the archival bandwagon. Cooler Crew is always looking for folks to help bring our vast library of past medallion lore into the modern era. Basically, we need some good keyboard hands. If you're interested in doing something to help create a wonderful piece of Minnesota history, this is where we need you the most. Please inquire with Greg Sax.

The Cooler Crew site is prominently featured on Pioneer Planet again this year. Adding to the fun, Cooler Crew members are likely to be a component of a documentary titled "No Time for Cold Feet" from New York-based Not Another Hollywood Film (NAHF). See the Medallion Page for further details.

Progress on our Medallion Page is smokin'. All the clues from all the years are now available. They're not currently as perfectly explained as they ought to be, but we'll be able to use them to help our hunting efforts. As time permits, the clue descriptions will be cleaned up and anecdotes will be added to make you laugh and clap.