Small Christmas upgrades

We’ve got a couple of small updates to announce today:

• One server type to rule them all?
• A forum facelift.

The Kitchen Sink: One server type to rule them all?

For quite some time, we have offered the “Apache 2.4, PHP, CGI” for PHP users and the “Apache 2.4 Generic” type for people who want to run Node.JS or other custom web server processes. It’s possible to run PHP under Apache 2.4 Generic as FastCGI, but it often requires you to rethink the structure of your application. That can be tricky if you didn’t write the application. There are workarounds but… they kinda suck. We’ve heard from several people in that position that they hate being in that position and wish they could just have both. Now, they can. We’ve added a server type called “The Kitchen Sink” that includes support for Apache, native PHP support, CGI, and custom daemons and proxies. This is great for people who need to run apps that are part PHP and part not, as well as for people with PHP apps who want to jam something like Memcached or Redis in there with it.

“The Kitchen Sink” is available on an experimental basis right now; from the Site Information panel, it’s enabled by editing your site’s service type. It may… or may not… get a different name when it leaves experimental status.

A forum facelift

As some of our longtime members may know, our member forum was originally based on phpBB 2. phpBB 2, however, reached end-of-life in 2009, so we’ve long since ditched most of the innards in favor of more modern, up-to-date code designed for PHP 8, not PHP 3. What we haven’t ditched, until now, is the now-brutally-outdated early-2000s-era aesthetic. We’ve made some behind-the-scenes fixes over the last couple of weeks designed to make the forum easier to understand and use. We’ve also finally put some effort into the design. That update went out today.

This is nothing groundbreaking; we tend to avoid “groundbreaking” when it comes to usability. But it’s a solid update from the early 2000s to at least the mid-2010s. This also isn’t the most important thing in the world but we wanted to close out the year with something a little bit fun but still beneficial. It’s been an absolutely wild year!

We hope the functional and design changes will make the forum easier to browse and read and more pleasant to interact with. I’ll still post there as my usual curmudgeonly self, though; apparently, no upgrade can fix that.

More information about the forum updates is available in the forum.

That’s all for now! More updates to come as soon as we’re finished tamping down the bugs flushed out by these!

5 Comments

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1. The forum looks good 🙂

   And hopefully, I’ll learn enough to try out that new server type… someday.

   Comment by Arjay — December 26, 2023 #

2. Muchly appreciate the new Kitchen Sink servers! It wasn’t a super-big deal to have to pay 5 cents/day for an extra server, but being able to consolidate my servers and avoid paying that is nice. Will look into it soon and see how smoothly it shakes out.

   Comment by Pixievolt No. 1 — January 3, 2024 #

3. Kitchen Sink looks interesting! Would be nice if I could pick the PHP version instead of being forced on 8.1.

   Comment by Meekro — January 6, 2024 #

4. There is no connection between server type and PHP Version. -jdw

   Comment by jdw — January 6, 2024 #

5. Very nice upgrades. Thank you!

   Comment by fos — January 28, 2024 #

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