What Just Happened to the Site?
I'm sure a lot of you are sitting there with a big o.O on your face right now. I got all your text messages and emails. Yes, the site was down. Yes, I broke it. So let me explain the good, the bad, and the ugly ...
As you all know, I spent almost a full week of staying up all night, every night, to upgrade our site from Icy Phoenix to Joomla 1.5. I had everything all configured and working fine. Tons of great components and addons. Everything BK needed and more! But there was one slight issue ... no way to assign access levels by BK rank. What does that mean in english? Well web sites have what's called Access Levels. It's a way to flag users and limit what they can and cannot do all over the site. I did my best to rig the site how I could without having real custom access levels. I used JomSocial "groups" to assign rank. And everything seemed like it would work out fine. But there was one fatal flaw ... privacy.
I had no way of making private areas of the site the way we need them. Especially in the forums. You see Joomla 1.5 has hard coded access levels. Really dumb ones too. They are: Public (anyone), Registered (default when you register on the site), Author, Editor, and Publisher. And then on the back end it has Moderator, Administrator, and Super Administrator. Not only are these hard coded into the site, but they cannot be renamed or edited. And to top it off, they are not compatible with 3rd party components. Such as the forums (Joomla does not come with any forums).
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The New Website
I'm sure a lot of people are wondering what in the world is going on. So let me explain. Basically our old site ran off of a back end component "Ice Phoenix". It was a very good system, and had a lot of good features. But it was not very custmizable. And we were about 2 years behind on updates to the system. We had a lot of custom (as in hacked) areas on our site to make it fit what we needed as BK. But I finally tried to upgrade it as we were having a lot of login issues lately. And when I did so, the site broke. I had backed up everything multiple times with our web host first. Including the database. But low and behold when I restored the backups they were from years ago when I first made the IP version of our new site. We had lost all our threads in the forums, all of our news for years, and all of our registered users over the last few years.
It was a huge hit to us. But sort of a blessing in disguise. We've needed to upgrade our site and fix some of the major bugs lately. And I've been meaning to do so before the end of this upcoming summer so that we are in full gear for the release of Battlefield 3. So let me explain what's going on as of right now:
There's good and bad. The good news is, this new site will have limitless features. It is being powered by Joomla, which is one of the most popular CMS packages out there. And it is open source, which means there are thousands upon thousands of "addons" we can put into our site. Some are free, some are not free. And if any of you are good with PHP and want to start learning how to work with the API of our new site, I'd love to get you to work on customizing some things to better suit the clan. The site itself is powered by Joomla 1.5.22. The forums are powered by Kunena 1.6.3. And the user system is powered by JomSocial 2.0.6. Any of you PHP buffs out there please feel free to brush up on these components and I'd love to get you helping on the site. I can even set up a test site for you to have full administrator access to in order to practice and learn on.
Now of course there are still some issues to be worked out. And the site is barely 30% complete. I have a long way to go. But I've rushed to get it at least online and usable. And it is definitely up to that level now. There's actually some incredible features already working on the site. I plan on making a complete tutorial with screen shots and all to help you with all the new features. But for now let me at least touch on the most important ones:
Black Knights 10th Anniversary!!!
As of January 2009 the Black Knights are officially 10 years old. It’s been a long road but we’ve held through. We’re struggling through these rough waters of a gaming slump. It’s almost like the Great Depression of gaming for the last year. But we’re still around and kicking, and as soon as something that sparks our interest comes along, this great group of gamers will come back alive to wreak havoc on other gamers. We'd like to thank all the members that have stuck with us throughout the years to make us one of the first and longest lasting gaming clans in history!
RIP Old BK Site
It's been about a month now on this new site. I've had some visitors e-mail me asking what happened to the site, but loving the new one. This is our official goodbye now. We've tested this for a month, and it is here to stay.
Everyone also give a bug thanks to T-Wolfe for all the work he put in to tweaking our old site. Also, most of you won't remember Zackron from so many years ago. But he helped me lay the initial functions and framework for our site that set me on about a decade project of hand coding our site from scratch. Also a mention to Xanthus, another very old school BK for a few function suggestions and code help.
And finally, some great statistics from our old site ...
- At one point, our google page rank was a 6/10. That's quite high for a clan site
- At one point, we were earning triple digit revenue from Adsense on our site.
- We achieved a total of 11,305 registered visitors on our old site.
- Our peak traffic averaged over 4,000 hits per day at one point
- There were 14,130 total threads in our forums
- There were 139,505 posts on our forums
- There were over 1,600 screen shots uploaded
- I received over 80,000 PMs during the life of that site lol