[Raion]

As we draw closer to an anticipated release of MyBB 1.9 I need to ask the questions:

1. Is there anyone in the community with web dev experience who would be willing to help design a new theme? 

The 1.9.x system is going to completely redo the theme engine, so our theme currently won't be portable. 

I cannot afford nor do I trust developers out there to not half-ass the job, so I was curious if we have any web dev guys here.

2. If you're interested, do you have experience with Twig? 

Twig is the engine they're using for theming for MyBB 1.9

3. Can you do a postgres migration?

I want to get us off MariaDB entirely because MariaDB is becoming difficult to backup. The database is less than 50M, but I do not have the expertise to do a postgres migration.

Payment isn't entirely out of the question, but I'm not exactly made of money so I couldn't do a 4 figure deal in all likelihood. 

The forum's 1.8.x branch is likely to be supported to some degree after MyBB 1.9 is released, but I would not like to wait for a last minute failure and risk us gettin hacked. 

Thanks for reading.

[pcar]

I can help out on the DB side.

[mgtremaine]

I want to get us off MariaDB entirely because MariaDB is becoming difficult to backup. 

Curious as to the specifics of this problem is. (Not trying to question it just wanted some details for my own information)
-Mike
[For those who don't php TWIG is template engine, i've only worked with it once and it is .. ok .. ]

[Raion]

Curious as to the specifics of this problem is. (Not trying to question it just wanted some details for my own information)
-Mike
[For those who don't php TWIG is template engine, i've only worked with it once and it is .. ok .. ]

Sure thing dude, I have no issue talking about it:

Postgres allows something called write-ahead log archiving, which means, you can have it set the write-ahead log up to act as a backup solution. From there, all you need to do is have a grab cron that copies the data to our backup machines. With MySQL/MariaDB, you have to cron a script that dumps the data, another that scp's the data, and another that rotates the backups out. This is a huge expense in time, development and bugtesting for obvious reasons. I'd rather not deal with that more than we have to.

Postgres seems to be a better app for scalability as well. I've been coding a bit in it, and while I'm not a full-time dev nor do i ever desire to code for a living, it's a pretty neat little technology.

[mgtremaine]

Interesting... I just read up on Postgres WAL vs Mysql Binary Logs and replication strategies. It does seem the WAL format is both fast easy to restore from directly.

(I will admit to just copying myisam raw files directly with rsync after flushing the buffers as backup on lower traffic applications, there is some risk of data loss but for better or worse I never ran into a problem with it, although I only had to reach for the files a few times in the decades across 10 or instances. One time an IT directory was being helpful and deleted a bunch of "cruft" out of the mysql data directories.. DOH! please stop)

-Mike

[Raion]

We use InnoDB on MariaDB to get full unicode and fulltext search support. Without it, half of the forum functionality would be broken. Hence, I'd rather avoid that limitation as innodb raw files are a pain in the ass to recover without ib_log or ibdata files.

[Raion]

The theme will not be reusable on MyBB 1.9 and I'm not willing to migrate to XenForo because it's proprietary and poorer quality, (I don't agree with rhe change of a "Private Message" to a "Conversation" either) therefore it's imperative we find a solution. The stock 1.9 theme looks genuinely awful.

I'll look more into it, but if web developers want to come forward I'll be happy to work something out.