Before I make my request, here’s a brief recap of the “Second Switch” situation for anyone who hasn’t been keeping up with the Slack conversations or my incessant posts:

Currently, this blog runs on ExpressionEngine 2, which is three major versions behind. It runs on a maximum of PHP 7.0, which is end-of-life and soon to be removed from our hosting. Continuing to run these ancient pieces of software is a security threat.

The upgrade process from EE2 to EE3 to EE4 to EE5 — yes, they recommend going through each process separately — is onerous and, by all reports, error-prone. Also, where ExpressionEngine used to be a commercial CMS, the company that created it, EllisLab (née pMachine), ceased to exist last year, and ExpressionEngine is now open source. Open source is good, but “open source as the last gasp of a dying platform” is less good. And while that phrase may be an exaggeration, I don’t think it’s that much of one: it has a Stack Exchange but it’s not very active, it doesn’t appear at all on Wikipedia’s list of CMSes, etc.

So, if we have a big upgrade process facing us no matter what, it seemed like the right time to consider another platform switch. And after discussing it in Slack, the obvious choice was to migrate away from the possibly-dying CMS with a meager ecosystem, to the most popular CMS in the world.

Therefore we (well, so far, just I) have started rebuilding the site in WordPress. My current plan is for us to be helped in this effort by using the most popular of the WordPress page builder plugins, Elementor Pro. For almost everything that currently requires hand-coded EE templates and HTML/CSS/JS/PHP, via Elementor and some other plugins we will instead use a drag-and-drop interface to build and style visual components that can be embedded anywhere on the site and changed everywhere at once. (Custom HTML, CSS, and JS snippets can still be pasted basically anywhere, if necessary.)

So: On the wiki I’ve put together some stubs of documentation for BlogNomic’s second replatform. There’s one page for definite plans, one for suggestions, and one for guides to stuff we need to do and/or how to do things after the Switch. Please read over these at your convenience, and edit them (or comment here, or post in #thesecondswitch in Slack) to make any and every suggestion you can think of. I can’t make many promises, but I’d love to hear about any longstanding annoyances or desired new features that I can consider addressing while I’m working on this.

The bulk of the work will take place between June 8 and 15, and by the end of that period I hope and plan to have the WordPress version in a state where a testing metadynasty can begin alongside whatever is going on in the main game. I have some ideas about this metadynasty that I’ll share as we get closer to time.

But: regarding that metadynasty, the upcoming upgrade, and BlogNomic in general, I am merely the technical steward here, not actually an authority or final decision-maker on things that affect the game. So if anyone has any issues with any aspect of this, by all means raise them here or in Slack. The first Switch metadynasty’s theme was “If it ain’t broke, fix it anyway”, which was a funny joke when the game was like two years old and running on Blogger. But fifteen years later, I’d much rather err toward fixing only what’s broken or widely desired. Running on EE2/PHP7.0 is broken in important ways, and changing platforms changes a lot of things automatically, but beyond what’s absolutely necessary, I don’t want to change anything that there’s not near-universal enthusiasm for. So please don’t hold back with your feelings on any of this.