The Need To Update

I've been terribly busy with various things, such that Write Wise's upgrade has been fairly low down the agenda lately. I've been working on 2.5 whenever I get a spare moment (which isn't often), which will introduce new, modern story profiles.

When I began updating Write Wise, it was largely to make the codebase more maintainable and modern. However, there are now two big threats facing the site:

• The site is not currently TLS-ready. That is, we are not running the site through HTTPS. Browsers like Opera and Chrome are beginning to consider non-HTTPS sites insecure, so there is a great need to make Write Wise HTTPS-enabled.
• The old portions of the site do not run on PHP7. Currently, the site is running on the fairly old PHP5 runtime. PHP7 has some significant benefits: it is about 50% quicker than PHP5, it provides modern programming language features (type hinting, for instance) etc. It's also the current version of PHP. PHP5 isn't going to be around forever. Having our codebase dependent on PHP5 is pretty bad.

Things aren't dire, though. The new segments of the codebase work just fine on PHP7 out of the box (a good thumbs up for the architectural decisions taken in 2015, it must be said!) and the site should function just fine under HTTPS with some not-too-major modifications.

More news to come soon. The move to modernise Write Wise has now become crucial to the site's survival -- I am hoping 2017 is the year most of the functionality is migrated.