SWAT Portal 3.0

As already announced we will upgrate the portal to a new more powerful and more flexible version.
Below are some images attached from our test environment which we have set up to see if we can use old features and how difficult or easy it will be to use the data from our old (current) Portal.

While not many features are installed yet it already is to see that the general style is very similar to our current one but in many areas much more detailed and more clean.
The performance of the new Portal will be much better as it makes used of different types of databases and a better cache system. Also the softwares code is very clean and optimized and used the latest web standards.

However... such a massive upgrade also will come with costs as I have to buy a large number of upgrade licenses for all the features we currently use. I personally expect about 300,- € for license upgrades and maybe a little bit more for some additional features. But in the end its an upgrade we sooner or later have to do since many features we currently use will only be supported on the new Portal software in future.

The full upgrade can be done during one weekend... while the forum would be up and running after a few hours already. But still we will wait a bit as some of our features are currently not yet re-released and i personally would like to wait until everything is available and until i got all the license upgrades done.

dunno about the donation stuff
however i really doubt that it can simply be taken from server donations as we dont have many paying clans

it wont as this project will only start if the funding is done

progress on this matter looks like this:

2 donations received
most plugins that we need are available but some are still in the works (wiki, arcarde games, calendar, gallery)
most of the missing plugins were announced for release q1 2014... so... we can only wait and hope for enough donations to cover the costs

i meanwhile have tested the new software and started to work on stuff like detail improvements on the style... small additional plugins... registering new caches... and testing how to import the data from the old portal.
most of it works... some requires adjustments... and the other stuff requires waiting for the plugin writers to do their job

performance tests with the new cache system showed that a standard page like the portal loads about 20% faster
on sites with larger volume it might be even more
however there are even better and faster cache systems but i have not figured out how to install and register these modules coz the server host by default does not support some of the components yet
Either i find a way or ill just wait for the host to upgrade their standard protocols which is just a matter of time.

biggest problem was and still is the feature of the community grounds which we have on the old portal. So far i got no reply from the developers if they will do an upgrade for this software.
If they wont a solution might be to offer board hosting for clans like it is done for BG already.