Last night we removed the "Transition Status" section from the Kamusi Project homepage. When we moved the site from the university where the project started out, we had to re-wire a great many features. Now we're declaring that job complete.

Imagine deciding that you want to relocate your Christmas tree to a new room and put all the decorations back in exactly the same place - made more complicated by the fact that different people have hung the ornaments at different times, with some decorations hanging from others hanging from others. Okay, the metaphor is getting even more overloaded than our imaginary tree, but you probably get the point.

We had to move the database, the search features, the edit features, the images, the discussion forums, the user accounts, the content management system, and much more. We had to acquire our domain names (can you believe that someone was sitting on the name kamusiproject.com until we talked with an attorney?), contract a server, and configure the whole mess. For a while, it seemed that the transition would be endless.

We still don't have all systems fully in place. For example, we have not finalized a non-profit presence in the US (our host organization, the World Language Documentation Centre, is registered in the UK), so Americans are not yet able to get tax deductions for donations to the project. (We hope to resolve this very soon.) We haven't gotten the slideshow working correctly on the homepage. We are still not able to display multiple language versions of the same page.

However, those items are now part of the normal task list, rather than things we need to do in order to get the bulk of the project's operations functional. You can use the site in the same way you could before the move, and if there are a few bugs along the way... well, that's the "project" in Kamusi Project. We'll fix the remaining issues, or try to, and we're working on a lot of improvements at the same time. But as far as our move to kamusiproject.org, I'm happy to report: Transition Accomplished!