Hi MD friends, we're bringing in the new year with some overdue housekeeping and site improvements. Here's the changelog:

• Server infrastructure upgrades
• Backup continuation
• New search boxes
• Battery pages
• Tailored infoboxes
• Releases section
• What's next

We've upgraded our wiki server to the latest available version of FreeBSD, PHP, and the Caddy webserver. We're very proud to have such a large and plugin-heavy wiki hosted on the latest infrastructure.

We've also cleaned up some logs, which caused a short outage when they filled up the available disk space. Stopping those log files from ballooning is a high priority to fix, even though it won't get so big for several months.

After a few months off with the server move, we're back to publishing regular site backups on our archive here. Make sure you read the README file to know which files we don't include with the backups.

A recurring headache has been how our search feature works on mobile. Buried under the sidebar in the hamburger menu, it's hard to find and doesn't scroll through suggestions well.

As a workaround until we can fix the upstream Dokuwiki template, we've added search boxes to the front page (searching the whole wiki) and to the Equipment start page (searching only equipment pages.)

Batteries are a big part of using MD portables, so we've created dedicated pages for each type in our Accessories section! - this will make it easier to find all devices that use certain batteries, link to modern rebuilds or replacements, and combine different model numbers of compatible batteries (such as the Gumstick)

This also necessitated updating our equipment databases to link to these pages instead of a drop down, and a new “battery notes” field for information about sidecars and battery quantities. Most of this has been completed but please see the Battery migration page for a comparison of the old and new data. We'll only remove the old data fields once we're confident nothing would be lost.

When editing the template we use for all of the infoboxes (on the right side or top of each equipment page) to link to the new battery pages, we also started to move deck pages to use a unique infobox without the battery fields. This is something we want to move more pages to over time.

Although the Releases section we have is really cool and we want to do everything we can to promote and support the good people putting out music on MD, it needs a lot of manual work and Discogs is probably doing anything we do much better.

As a long term project I'd like to find a better way of making that section work, be it with Discogs API integration or something else. In the meantime it's still open and accepting new page adds, but I have removed the (usually broken) “Recent album releases” section from the front page.

I just updated the projects page with our priorities coming up, many of which we'll get started on straight away. Updating the guides is the most important one of these.

Until the next update (hopefully with news of these guide updates) - take care and happy new year!