If we really have to upgrade the site software, I would really suggest that you avoid custom solutions for a site like this. For one, a custom solution is likely to ever only have a couple of people look at the code, and it will only ever be installed on one site. An off the shelf solution such as vBulletin and DokuWiki is a far more secure solution, especially when the features we really need are a forum and a wiki. Plug vBAdavanced into that for a portal and you have everything you need. vBAdvanced has a bunch of nice features, like automatic placement of new items from a forum on the front page.

I would also suggest we avoid heavy customisation, because the more customisation you do, the trickier it becomes to upgrade when software updates are available. The site has suffered directly because of this in the past, and I speak from personal experience of maintaining highly customised sites in the past (I eventually removed all customisations for an easier life).

Having a contractor do this would cost a not insignificant amount of cash... cash that could be better spent on competition prizes for example. I appreciate having a contractor do it would relieve staff from handling it, but we could also end up in a situation where our only choice for maintenance is to go back to the contractor as we won't know all the details of how the system works... not a good scenario.

I also agree with Traveler but for different reasons. Migrating the site is not really the answer as it won't solve the real problems which are a lack of time on the part of the admins and a decline in popularity of the language. No matter how easy you make it to post stuff, if people don't have the time, it won't happen. I've spent a month in Belfast and I have a bunch of posts I want to write for my blog about my time there, but finding the time to do it... unless I sit down and set aside some time, it's not going to happen and at the moment, I have a bunch of more important stuff to do. Delphi isn't as popular these days, which is hurting us too, but it isn't dead. At work, we've managed to convince our bosses that rewriting everything in .net isn't always the right thing to do and the job market for Delphi is starting to pick up again. Pascal is still used as a teaching tool so people are still being exposed to it. But, it isn't always peoples tool of choice and that is the real problem. We need to convince people that it is a viable choice for writing games... unfortunately, the lack of final entries in the last competition hasn't done a lot to help with that. There also aren't that many great eyepopping projects being posted about (probably due to a lack of time/interest)... changing forum software won't help with that.

In short, if we are going to change site software, we should go with off the shelf tools (vBulletin, vBAdvanced and DokuWiki... the only one of these that cost money is vBulletin), stick to their default styles and customise as little as possible to make maintaining the site easy. We should also try and encourage the community to help with some of this stuff. If someone drops me a mail with news, I'll post it, but I don't have the time to go hunting for news myself. No one has written any new stuff for the library for ages... there are more people visit this site than just the admins, so come on people... this is a community site... if you want content, help us... write stuff, send us news, post some nice eye popping screenies of your projects. And this now feels like a serious case of deja vu... take a step back a few years and this is exactly the same discussions that were going on... people complaining about the site theming... lack of content... lack of news... and funnily, I think I said exactly the same back then.

PGD revolves around the community and if that community is shrinking, it is inevitable that the site will shrink in response. But, there will always be the die hards who love the language and what it can do who will always use it as their first choice for developing stuff (I put myself in this category)... I'll always want the site and the resources it provides.