About a week ago, the Trex content management system basically broke.
To me the internal workings of the server are a black box. I don't know how it works, and I do not know what went wrong. It was written by a programmer who left before it was finished. This happens sometimes in software. It totally sucks. Nothing to be done about it.
When this happened in July, I hoped we'd get a chance to do two things:
1. Use the software for a while.
2. Port it to some other environemnt.
No one knew how long #1 would be. And #2 pretty much proved impossible. node.js looked like the best candidate for porting. I asked around, a couple of people took a look at it, some programming happened, but as of October 7, 2013, this is not a possible way out.
Basically, we're at the end of this bit of road
1. Fargo itself does not depend on a server, so it runs fine. I'm using it right now to write this post. I've been using it to plan projects and trips, it's unaffected.
2. However, Fargo as a blogging system, that no longer works. And there are no paths forward that have it working again.
3. So if you're using it as a blogging system, you pretty much have to find a new way to publish your content.
4. However, there's no need to export any data because it was never stored on our servers. It's all sitting there in your Fargo folder.
5. There are developers working on a WordPress-based back-end. Hopefully when they're ready, they'll let us know how to hook in.
On behalf of Small Picture and myself, I apologize for this failure.
Software projects sometimes don't work out. I wanted it to be a big success. There are a lot of great ideas in Trex. But for now, there's no hope of it serving as a back-end for Fargo users' website.
If you're a Fargo user, if you were using it for a blog, let's see if we can find a way for you to publish your content elsewhere.
If you're a Scripting News reader, knock wood, the outage should be over. There are still some holes to fill in. But I think the site will be even more reliable than it was.
If you have questions or comments, the usual guidelines apply, please post them here. Thanks!