Since our announcement last week, REC has begun the transition process to the new System 40 environment.
As previously announced, System 40 is a complete overhaul of the REC systems universe with all in-house services being moved to a different provider. This is giving us a golden opportunity to do a complete update to the underlying operating system and content management software (CMS) without causing a disruption to current operations. This change is not as easy as just copying code from one location and inserting it somewhere else. With the major changes that have happened between PHP5 and PHP8, we are needing to do updates to all source code to make them PHP8 compliant. This is not a fast process. But we are moving along.
We are currently working on the REC Toybox applications. These are the interactive applications that reside on the recnet.com domain behind our Drupal CMS. A part of System 40 is an upgrade from Drupal 7, which is about to reach end of life to Drupal 10. Drupal 10 presents a new challenge as the way we used to embed applications into the CMS cannot be done and a different method will need to be used. The FCC had a similar challenge with their Drupal CMS installation and we have found the solution that they used could be applied over here. This involves the use of a Javascript interface that serves the underlying application outside of the CMS and then the script delivers it into the CMS. This has been tested successfully.
At this time, we are doing code conversion on the Toybox applications. So far, the following Toybox applicaitons have been converted and will be ready when we cut over to Drupal 10:
- A10 Impact Report
- ARRR (Pirate radio enforcement database)
- Callsigns (Recent FCC call sign activity)
- CAP (IPAWS/NWS event viewer)
- Channel Points (part of REC's Translator Reform proposal, RM-11952)
- Dingers (Enforcement actions)
- 7 internal applications
We note that the look and feel of recnet.com under Drupal 10 will be a little bit different. We plan to clean up the top menus and make things a little more streamlined. A small number of features, such as the knowledge quiz and the event calendar in its current form will not make it to the new site due to a lack of supporting modules for Drupal 10.
We have established a connection from System 40 to our legacy database, which permits REC to be able to fully interact with the live database without having to build a parallel system until we find it necessary to move the full database to the new site. This may mean that once we cut over applications to System 40, there may be a slight reduction in performance due to the latency on the database connection. This will not be an issue after we achieve a full cut-over.
We still have a long way to go with this project. Other than test entries in the database, we do not expect many issues with our production sites during development. Obviously, there may be issues at the time of cutover. The RECnet.com Drupal CMS will be completely cut over at once and then eventually each standalone system (FCCdata, FCC.today, LPFM.us, myLFPM, etc.) will be individually cut over.
We will continue to update on progress through the Changelog process. Major developments such as planned cutovers or scheduled outages will be also announced through our primary announcement channels including the main website postings and the REC Facebook page.
Thank you for your patience.
