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).
I tried and tried. I hacked and downloaded and modded and did everything I could. But there was just no way to get by with these terrible access levels.
But the good news is, Joomla 1.6 was released not long ago. It's pretty new, has a few bugs, and only has about 5% of the available addons that 1.5 has. But more are coming, and Joomla 1.6 is the new big thing so it will get a lot better over time. And the one final selling point is ... custom user access levels at the core level! This means I can make my own user groups and user access levels at the core level (as in not with some addon) that are fully integrated into every aspect of the site. Including the forums. I literally can decide who (by BK ranks that I created) can see links, articles, pages, forums, etc. I can even assign a seperate template for the entire site per rank. Literally every piece of data on this site has dozens of "permissions" settings that are all tied in to my custom access levels (BK ranks).
So I had to re-create the entire site again from scratch. I have been busting my rear for days now trying to get this done. I've managed to get our articles re-created from the recent "re-design" site. I've got the forums all set up and privatized (notice you can't see the private forums right now). I've pretty much got the site to a workable level. I still have more content to migrate over. But it is to the point I can say it is working and ready for you all to play with. I'm sure you'll find some bugs here and there, but the parts we as BK need are for sure working. I made those my top priority.
The bad news is, you need to re-register. I didn't bother with the import I did from last time because it seemed to cause more problems than it solved. Each of you seems to use a different email now and I was flooded with "I can't login with that info" messages from you all. Wish I would have known that before I spent hours importing all your data. But no worries. Just re-register or "Connect with Facebook" (still the prefered and easier method). Remember when you connect with Facebook it will ask you for your Name, username, and password. The name is your BK nickname. I set it up so it doesn't use any of your real info from Facebook. The username is for the BK site, as is the password. With those set, you can just login the normal way in the future for example if you are on a computer not logged in to facebook.
Sorry for the trouble. If it makes you feel any better, your 7 seconds of re-registering or connecting to facebook are nothing compared to the 70 hours of work I put in AGAIN on this site in the last few weeks alone.
