Check it out here: http://www.urdland.com

Our old website was borked after the webhoster upgraded PHP, which Joomla (1.1…) could not handle. Many pages did not show content but merely an error message, so it was time for action. After some deliberation we decided to do something radical and 1) move away from our old webhoster, and b) switch to WordPress.

For changing the webhoster we have several reasons. The server that we’re using now is actually ours, so we have much more freedom and control over what happens. Furthermore, given the recent (at the time of writing) issues regarding the NSA monitoring everything and everyone that is even remotely related to the US, switching over from an American to a Dutch hosting provider seems like a good idea. Granted, the Dutch have ‘Brein’, an agency vetted to shut down every website that allows the downloading of copyrighted material through whatever means necessary, but it is the lesser of two evils. Extra bonus: ping times for Europeans (our main target audience) will have dropped significantly and this should provide a better browsing experience.

About the switch to WordPress… Joomla’s user interface (mostly on the admin side) is quite cumbersome. Because our website doesn’t have that many fancy requirements, we believe WordPress is a better solution – easier to use, and easier to update ;o)

We’ve copied over the old forum (will change the layout to match the new website later on), user accounts are still the same so if you had one you can still use it. Old news messages are not transferred so we’re keeping it fresh, yo. In the new design we hope to “sell” URD better by focusing on clarifying what URD can do and why people should use it. If you have any tips or questions, please post them in our forum. There’s a button that will take you to it somewhere on this page

O and there are a bunch of new screenshots available as well.

And that is not all yet. A new version of URD is coming real soon now. And it has a whole bunch of improvements:

• Browse pages add more data when scrolling to the end of the page
• Updated smarty to 3.1.14
• Updated jquery to version 1.10.2
• Updated the way previews are shown is user interface
• Made challenge verification (XSS prevention) optional
• Changed the order of downloads and uploads in the overview
• Updated some extsetdata types
• Updated style of message bar, moved it to bottom and bigger with border
• Added rating to spots overview
• Enabled displaying extset information for Spots
• par2 now also works when the archive files have been renamed
• Added next/previous buttons to page skipper
• Store usenet server password encrypted in the database
• Installer can now handle the case where the only one user can exist in the database
• Password changes include a check for weak passwords
• Password creation in installer include a check for weak passwords
• Changed style of installer to light
• Ajaxified the preferences and configuration pages
• Preferences will now be automatically saved after editting
• Ajaxified admin/log
• Rewrote registration and forgot password pages
• Fixed bug with subcat selector in spots
• Fixed a bug in importing RSS feeds / groups settings
• Fixed bug deleting the image files of expired spots from the cache
• Fixed bug in editting extended set info
• Fixed bug not sending messages when download failed
• Fixed bug in showing total diskspace in stead of available diskspace
• Fixed bug in not setting the adult flag correctly on saving newsgroup settinsg
• Fixed an problem displaying special characters in some statistics images
• Cleaned up error handling in web interface
• Added option to remove spots when a configurable limit of spam reports is received
• Correct spot timestamps that are in the future