As you’ll no doubt have noticed if you’ve previously visited any time in the last decade or two, EPoS Wizard has undergone some quite drastic changes!
YOU WILL BE REQUIRED TO CHANGE YOUR PASSWORD
(See below if you are unable to receive a password reset request)
It’s fair to say that EPoS Wizard has been merely plodding along for some years now, mostly by virtue of the fact that it didn’t break in the meantime 😉
Partly due to the inevitable deprecation of the version of PHP that has served it so well for many years and partly due to the fact it was high time it received a bit of love and care, we’ve spent some time giving EPoS Wizard a radical makeover.
We still think that EPoS Wizard has the potential to serve a function that otherwise doesn’t appear to exist, and besides, it’s become a bit of a repository of useful titbits of information over the years, and felt that it would have been sad to see it consigned to history, and instead have decided to give it a modern makeover and add a host of new functionality in the process. We hope you like the changes and stick around for many more years!
About Your Data
We have migrated user data across to the new framework, albeit we obviously cannot retain your hashed secure passwords intact, nor retain cookie settings from the previous system. So you’ll need to change your password and verify your email address when you first sign in. We see that as a good thing for several reasons, including weeding out active from inactive users, but also because GDPR and stuff happened since last time this site was prodded at, so we would require everyone to acknowledge the new terms and cookie settings etc anyway.
Beyond that, though, your account should hopefully be largely intact, and even enhanced! We are still tweaking a few things in terms of user groups and the like.
There have been some casualties; not all forum accounts apparently made it across, but from a pool of over 36000 registered forum users with over 23000 posts between them, less than 500 posts have been attributed to ‘Anonymous’. Whilst all customer accounts from the online store have also been imported, we were unable to import order histories, although since purchased downloads were historically only available for 7 days from purchase, we don’t see this being too much of an inconvenience. For information, in its new guise, the store is set to allow re-downloads of purchases at any time.
If You Cannot Reset Your Password
We fully appreciate that you may no longer have access to the email account with which you initially signed up in order to request a password reset. If this is the case, please use this form to get in touch, and we should be able to help you recover your account.
New Features!
Naturally, moving everything into a single extensible modern ecosystem affords us a lot of opportunities for new features and functionality, and we hope that you’ll find them useful and that they may help breathe some new life into Epos Wizard!
If you visit your profile, you will see that it has a much enhanced feature set that we hope you’ll find useful and take advantage of.
You can now post your own status updates, posts, files, videos, photos and much more. You can friend and message other users, send invitations to non users, view and filter all of your activity at a glance, including any mentions or favourited content. You can even customise your profile page with your own information and ‘widgets’, such as adding a slideshow or portfolio or your social media contact information. Of course, if you wish, you can make your profile private.
Hopefully everything works as intended for everyone, but if you should encounter any issues, please do reach out and we’ll try our best to help.
About The Changes
Technically speaking, it was not easy!
While the old forum software steadfastly refuses to work on any current version of PHP, similarly the newest versions of the software wouldn’t run on the old PHP we were running. There was no straight conversion path from old to new, and in any case, it required removing all of the modifications that had been made to the BB software as they were no longer compatible with modern versions and had long since been superseded.
The only viable course of action was to install an entirely new version of the software and manually import the data into it. Which is no easy task due to the sheer size and scale of Epos Wizard’s database! We couldn’t even do this within the same hosting account, because once we switched PHP, there was no going back ever for any reason! Which is why we have had to entirely migrate to another hosting account and register a new domain to work from in the meantime. Which is why you may have noticed that you were redirected and are currently viewing eposwizard.com, now!
After trying three different ways to update the forum software, and all failing in one way or another, we had more success importing the data into entirely other software than we did simply upgrading. In the end, we’ve opted to recreate the site with WordPress, BuddyPress and WP Foro, a very fully featured and nicely rounded forum system designed for WordPress. We’ve also redeployed the manuals store in Woocommerce. This has given us much more control over the site than we could have otherwise done with even the most recent versions of phpBB, and we’ve tried to make it much easier to use on mobile. Let’s face it, it has to be better than the previous incarnation of Epos Wizard on mobile! 😉
Also, apologies if you’ve recently posted on the old site – one or two new threads won’t have made it across because of the time between backup > convert > import > develop > launch of this new framework. Unfortunately, since it was such a prolonged and involved process to convert the data, we have taken the decision to not repeat it for the sake of a few posts, which would be next to impossible anyway… it was a bit all or nothing.