Lotro Life Revamped

Dear Visitors,

It has been more than 3 and a half years since we first started www.lotrolife.com. My wife and I started this site out of pure love for having a chance to play a game set in the Lord of the Rings universe. The site was programmed in a PHP framework I messed around back in 2007 called CakePHP and it has served us well over the years. Our design dates back to 2008 (or maybe early 2009 - I can't remember) and I bet everyone and their mothers have gotten sick of it. All in all, this platform hosted 1.7 million visitors and 5.6 million page views over the years, which is no small feat for something we did in our spare time (and sometimes it was all of our spare time for months).

Time has come for a change on our site. We have decided to switch to WordPress as the back-end for Lotro Life. It will make our lives much easier with its great article creating capabilities and it should provide less clunky interface for you guys to interact on the site. We are also in the process of changing the site's design, but it is far from being complete. The task of converting from a custom-coded site to an entirely different system proved to be a daunting task buy itself. Converting all of the elements of the old design (cluttered as it was) into a new thing that is as informative, but far less congested is going to take a lot of time. I just didn't have the nerves anymore to hold back on the new platform. That is why you will be seeing some pages with the old design, and some with the new and yes, the right hand double column with menus is awful. The most important thing is that the content is all there (we hope 😉 ) and that there will be much more of it now that the back-end is more user friendly. In the meantime, some of you might have noticed that we started a LOTRO Quests database and we are very excited about that as well, but I do not feel that the Quests project is out of the beta and we'll be making an announcement as soon as we feel comfortable with it.

Just as LOTRO renewed its vigor by going Free to Play, we will attempt to do the same with LOTRO Life and continue living Lord of the Rings Online alongside you guys, only with some new "clothes" on.

Wishing you all Epix,
Silriel and Beleglin