yeah ive been worried about it for a while lately since the new site has taken so long. we've had to rebuild every feature from scratch which turns out to be about 27 seperate systems... what a headache is been. So here is the long short story:
- current server has issues, but code from 2000
- new server has new OS, new php, new mysql, new hardware; some of which is not backward compatible with the old code
- new site has low level logic that requires each system to be "plugged in" passing variables to the wrapper so all had to be written to be compatible with each other.
So even as we speak there are some systems that are not fully db designed, but about 99% are and we are coding it all together. So we have to build them all at the same time as apposed to building one then the next.
The good news is that ive been speaking with all the partners and professionals out there and just about every one of them does not take cgnetworks / cgchannel seriously. in fact they see their forums going to crap because they are gaining more and more "high school students" posting.
the new eta for the site is Nov 1st, and when its up there certainly will be no one that can catch up to it as far as an integrated community -- it would take months just to go through the logic just as we did. It may look simple looking at the pages but behind it this new system is the most complex system ive ever seen (and I've worked on some pretty crazy [censored] for my "day job").
moving forward we are classifying ourselves as a "digital media file exchange community" so that we can disguinish ourselves from sites that are just Forums and just news calling themselves "communities". That is what im pushing our partners to push as us as well.
Though the new site has a much better integrated news system that spawns off to the forums, reviews area, interviews, and "featured tutorials" that are linked from cinefex -- at lot of the content we were doing in Highend Magazine.
every week goes by and i get pissed we havent got more done but then i realize we are actually accomplishing a lot and im very confident at this point when we launch we will be in really good shape.
im going to start some lists for the reviews, interviews, writers... I konw there are plenty of guys out there that want to help so now we'll give them the place. We'll also have a "press release" list just for press releases, but that wont be an objective of the site. But it will keep us in competition with those sites for the amount of press thats out there. Theres no shortage of PR people posting to our news section now.
so thats an update 
18+ hours a day working on the new site (for me). 1 1/2 full time programmers, myself and 2 other designers working everyday.
Will