March 28, 2024
A much needed revamp, and the end of a long standing relationship.. we are moving on to Warbirds of India 3.0 .. and likely more frequent updates in the process!

Warbirds of India was officially launched on 1st January 2001 and it has now been 22 years in existence. It has undergone a revamp only once in its lifetime – around January 2009 when the static website was migrated to Joomla CMS. While Joomla reduced the workload considerably, it was still not user-friendly enough to allow easy updates. The pace of updates had slowed down over the years.

It is time for a change, and I am pleased to announce that we are moving to Version 3.0 of the Warbirds site. The CMS has been migrated to WordPress. Starting 1st August 2022, the WordPress site will go live on both the existing domains – www.warbirdsofindia.com and on www.warbirds.in. Along the way, I had to let go of some ‘standards’. There was a bit too much obsession with URLs and the way images were hosted in Joomla..This however acts as a self-imposed obstacle to regular updates.

The switchover to WordPress also ends a long-standing relationship that I have had with Netfirms. Netfirms had been hosting our website for nearly 17 years now, from September 2005. Netfirms offered us a very reliable hosting service, and features that supported the plans for multiple CMS , gallery installations, MySQL databases. However over the years, with the updates have slowed down, many of the additional features fell by the wayside and are not needed. The visitor traffic was also not as much it used to be. So many of the bells and whistles that Netfirms offered was a bit of an overkill

The site is moving to a simplified AWS solution. I say goodbye to Netfirms with gratitude. Thanks for all the good service over the years. I am assuming that running this solution in AWS is beneficial both in terms of support and cost. However at any point we have issues, moving a WordPress site is much easier to do so in the future.

There will be glitches and issues with the migration – the way the images are being displayed. Missing Map features etc.. but we will fix these in due course of time.

Thank you for bearing with us all these years.

2 thoughts on “Warbirds of India 3.0

  1. In Kerala, on SH-1 just on the outskirts of Kottayam is a MiG23 parked in the front of the Govt Polytechnic. The serial number seems to be SM316.
    I could not get a photo.

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