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:
Logging in and Registration: The only data I was able to recover was from years ago. I spent many hours saving all the old login information that I could get my hands on, and then manually putting it into this new site. But it may be old data. For example today I had to work with Sinden on his login because the email address I had on him was outdated. I can tell you this right now, the easiest way to get logged into the site is with the new "Login with Facebook" feature. I actually want people using this if at all possible. Now I configured this feature to keep you all happy. When you do it for the first time it will ask you for your Name (what we all use as NickName's in BK, for example I entered "T-Bird"). I did this so that your real name is not used from your Facebook login. I also have it set to not post annoying things to your wall (it is a feature, and I turned it off). It will of course ask you to allow the BK site permission to access your Facebook. But I can assure you that it does not use any of your private information, display any personal information on this site, and does not post things to your wall and other annoying crap a lot of sites do. If you need your username at all, it is your nickname from the old site. With capital letters and all. For example "Ganked" or "Sinden" or "T-Wolfe" etc. Ultimately if you have any issues the first step would be to just contact me and I'll see what I can do for you. For example Sinden's problem was that his facebook account had his new email address, but our site had his very old one. When he logged in with Facebook he selected "Existing BK site user" and it tried to find him by pairing up those emails. It of course failed. So if you get this problem, just put that you are a "New User to the site" and then I will just delete the "old you" from this site.
Forums Privacy and Ranks: Right now our user system JomSocial allows me to do two things I really needed to do for our roster. 1) I can assign custom fields to people's profile. For example I made a "BK" field and it is basically a yes or no checkbox. I made a "Rank" field that has all our ranks listed. And 2) It has what it calls "groups" built into it. We are using these groups as ranks. Each group is private and each rank has a group. That's how we are issuing rank. If you are a KoS you can request to join the KoS group. Or I can just invite you to that group. And that's how it works with rank. The cool thing is, the groups have a lot of functionality in themselves. And it's all private to the group members. Like their own photos, videos, walls, etc. Basically this JomSocial thing is our own BK Facebook built into our site. You should click "Your Profile" and go exploring. It's insane all the things we can do. But I am having an issue right now with the groups and forum permissions. Right now I have the rank specific forums tied to the groups (for example if you post a thread in the KoR forums, it appears on the "Latest Discussions" in the KoR group wall. But for some reason I can't get the forums to restrict access to only those group members. I have a support ticket in about it and am awaiting a reply. We are using JS G-Kunena plugin to tie the forums and groups together, but it is not restricting access for some reason. I really need someone good with PHP to find a fix for this. So for now just know that no forums are "private".
Points System: The points system has returned and it is very extensive! I am working on more options and awards for the points. I actually have a project for someone if you'd like to work on it for me. Basically need some small clip art designs of medals and awards to be displayed with different points achievements. Our profiles now actually have a medals/badges achievement panel in them kind of like the way some FPS games do. You can earn all sorts of cool stuff. And the points system is so complex that there are literally thousands of "rules" in the points plugin definitions. Man that was some work. Took me a full day to configure all those rules and assign positive and negative point values to them all. So get active on the site! You'd be suprised how complex the point system is now. For example, if you publish some content (I will be assigning certain ranks as authors on the site, for like news and such) then you get points for every person that reads that content, even if it is just some unregistered guest! Or if you refer someone to our site (there's a special referer link in your profile page) and they register, they are almost like a "Vassal" of yours and you gain a percentage of all the points they ever earn! Sort of like a pyramid scheme. There's literally thousands of points rules now. It's pretty sweet. And we have the ability to hold raffles where people can spend their points on the raffle etc.
Overall we're going to really have a lot to do with this site. Feel free to play around with it right now. Nothing is on that you can "break" that I know of. I got the site to a usable level before turning it on. The old .org address has that "This site is down" message for a reason. I still need access to the old site to pull data from it. Once I am done I will activate the .org site to just be a mirror of the .com site and thery will both go to the same place. But for now just use the .com site. Well for now and always. It won't be changing.
