Neowin relaunches today, prepare for downtime

Steven Parker, Neowin co-owner, has confirmed that Neowin will be relaunching today.

As part of the upgrade the whole back end code for our front page is being replaced with shiny new code which should mean less hamsters die trying to power the servers. Also included in the upgrade is the following:

We are upgrading from Invision Power Board 2.x.x to 3.0.5 which includes:
o Invision Power Blogs 2.1 (RC2)
o Completely new theme called Atlas.
All previous themes you are used to on the forums will be scrapped, but will be compensated for new colors of Atlas (Blue, Midnight, Green, Reddish, Brown, Black).
Full page spy and mini spy (now known as latest forum activity)
Full replacement of our content management system (now Neowin Management System) to be replaced with Ignition, built from custom code by Dave Legg on Synapse, this handles our news.
Full iPhone, Android, Palm support across the forums and main page. Limited support for various other devices.

We are very excited about the upgrade and hope you'll enjoy the new features. Subscribers have taken part in a limited beta test to provide crucial feedback and we've tweaked and changed various features thanks to their feedback. Neowin staff have also provided input over the months of development.

During the downtime IRC will be functional and we'll have a place-holder page with details on the upgrade during a Cover It Live blog, a video walk-through of the new features and we'll do out best to answer any questions you have on IRC and through comments on the live blog.

The upgrade is planned to start at 12PM GMT which will be for most US visitors, the early morning hours of Friday. We expect the upgrade to take at least 12 hours but keep an eye on the live blog and IRC for full details later today.

A special thank you to our talented team of developers who without them this would not be possible: