Voxilla.com and the Voxilla Forums will be down for maintenance tonight, starting at 8pm Pacific. The upgrade shouldn’t take more than two hours.

The Voxilla community grew past the 20,000 member mark on Friday.

We currently have 50-75 new members per day and the number of new members per day is increasing as more people learn about VoIP.

Thank you for being a part of our community and contributing to the Communications Revolution.

It’s been about eight hours since we launched the new Voxilla content site, and nothing has broken yet.

That’s a testament to the tremendous work done by Eric Chamberlain, Voxilla’s Director of Engineering, and his talented team of coders and designers who, for the past 12 weeks, have worked with little sleep (and lots of diet Dr. Pepper) to completely overhaul our editorial presentation. Here’s a partial list of what they accomplished:

* A complete transition of the editorial site from tired PostNuke content management system to the much sleeker and more powerful Joomla CMS;
* A complete migration of tens of thousands of posts from our cranky and quickly aging forum system to vBulletin;
* Migrating thousands of content items from the old system to the new without losing existing link functionality;
* Moving tens of thousands of registered users over to the new system;
* Development of entire new ways of presenting content, and for providing enhanced reader participation and interaction, including full product reviews.

There are still some tweaks left to do (and I’m sure you’ll let us know about them), but that’s for another day. Today, we celebrate . . . and take a five minute breather.

The new Voxilla.com site is live. Switching to the new site was a major undertaking and is what I was doing with my evenings and weekends for the past three months.

We’ve made some major improvements, including switching content management platforms and forums. The old site ran on PostNuke and PNphpBB2 and was difficult to maintain. The new site runs on Joomla! and vBulletin. Just like with the old site, the user accounts are shared between the content and forum software, so users only need to register once and can manage their account information from a single location.

Please let us know if you encounter any problems with the new site or have improvement suggestions.

Voxilla has been in the midst of a complete corporate makeover in 2006, from the inside out.

We have completely revamped our back-end systems to provide for greater accountability and inventory control, as well as increased responsiveness in our fulfillment and support endeavors.

Even though it’s been a challenging year from a pure device sales perspective, it feels like we’ve made a lot of progress as a company.

We have also been re-designing our public-facing presence, Phase I of which rolled out with the new Forum about two weeks ago. Today we went live with Phase II, the the new Voxilla News and Information site.

Although we had hoped to roll out in concert with VON last week, it just wasn’t quite right, and looking at it today, I’m glad we waited. I like our new look, even if there’s a little too much red going on — but that will get fixed in short order.

The idea is to get back to what launched this company, which was fresh, incisive content on the people, products, and issues driving the growth of our industry, and I believe now we’ve got a platform we can use to achieve our goals.

Phase III is the new Voxilla Store, which we’d love to have public by the end of the month. Stay tuned for details and some “Grand Re-Opening” Specials.