SWAT Portal 2.0

[portalnews]As you can see the old SWAT Portal is completely gone and got replaced with this new version.
After many years maintaining the old Portal and keeping it technically up to date there was the need for a fresh new and modern system that combines the Forum with a Portal and many new features again.

Most of the Data from the old Portal has been transfered. Some still is waiting to get transfered by the new Portal Staff. Next to the forum and the new Portal a few hundred plugins got installed by me and several got rewritten. The key feature are working meanwhile but many additional features such as the blogs, the internal wiki, the cms and some more are not working yet. They require further settings. Not everything is perfect yet... some links may not work (actually all the links in old posts are wrong now), some parts of the forum are missing translations... all that will get done within the next week. It will take alot of time to find out how everything is working. So far I had only 2 days time for the installation.

The new Portal is not just a forum... its more like some kind of social network... that is of course only if the members will decide to use these features.

Oh and one more thing... because of the transferal of the old Forum data to the new forum (which actually was not even supported until I made it possible) there has been a rollback of about 24hours. So whatever you posted during that time is lost. In my eyes still acceptable considering the new features.
You also should update your Userprofile since most of that info is outdated and some could not get transfered.[/portalnews]

Quote from Blaster

Nice, it's public now. So what happened to the week's work?

the week is still there... ive done about 30% of the settings so far

After 2 weeks of work the new SWAT Portal is fully functional now.
All areas and plugins are working fine now and are available in both supported languages.

Since the move from the old Portal to the new one for sure has not just been a hard step for me but also for the users which have to learn how to use the new software i decided to give a small.... very small introduction of the features.
I dont want to go too much into details since that has to be covered by the new FAQ Plugin of this forum that is going to be build by the members of this forum and the moderators.

ok where to start?
Best is to start with the forum... like already meantioned some posts ago the content of the old forum is still there. Nothing is lost and most of the forum fuctions still work like on the old forum since we just use a new version (a commercial version). New thread, Reply, quick reply,... all that works just like usually.
The reply is a bit different since it has 2 modes... the normal editor and the source code mode.
Unless you are working with html you wont need the source code mode. Just type your messages like you always did.
Below the text area are the settings for your posts... there are plenty of those but they are self explaining. You can create polls there, connect four games or attach files/images.

The search function of the forum does work a bit different. Actually the search function (the quick search on the top of the forum) is a portal wide search. BUT the search result depend on how you use the search.
e.g. you are on the Freelancer board of this forum and use the search there you will get only search results of the forums inside it
e.g. if you use the search on the main site of the forum then you get search results of all the forum boards
e.g. if you use the search on the wiki you get search results of the wiki but not from the forum
The search function has an advanced mode where you can specify what you are looking for and where you want to search. To activated this advanced search just hover with your mouse over the quick search and you get the option to switch to the advanced version of it. If you dont find the advanced search there then simply use the search button on the right site of the header.

The Portal is unlike the old version not serperated from the forum... its directly linked and is the main site of SWAT.
New users will automatically connect to the portal. The domain www.forum.swat-portal.com will someday disappear since it is not needed anymore.
The purpose of the portal is to show the latest news about SWAT and the supported games. The news plugin will have to be rewritten to show more than just one opened news item but that change will come soon enough. Next to the local news you will find RSS Feeds about our supported games. And of course you will find statistics, information about members and services on the Portal.

Unlike the old Portal the new one does not contain content pages with information about games. This part of the old forum will be covered by the new Games Wik. All members can contribute there. Aswell as all members soon will be able to upload files to the download database and the gallery.
These 3 areas are used to present information about our supported games to the users of the site. Thats the future of SWAT.
The Wiki actually works like the forum... no special wiki code is needed. Either you use the integrated WYSIWYG editor or you use html code. Actually no magic behind all that.

Community links to the other SWAT sites also exist just like on the old portal.

Yeah we have forum games again.
5 forum games have been added aswell to this forum. Unfortunatly the old arcade games are not compatible with this forum version but im already working on a solution to this problem (so far this is the only feature of the old forum which i was not able to integrate into the new one yet).
The games are self explaining but also contain a manual.

The final 2 areas are the Forum tools which contain some useful stuff for the members, however i will explain that later, and we have Info panel with help and FAQs.
Best if you try out the features by yourself, thats the fasted way of learning it.

So ... the main site is explained.

If you have taken a look around already you will notice that there are tons of new user features.
Friends lists
Guestbooks for every user
User Wanted Posters (where users can introduce themself)
own gallery
ratings for users and for posts
teamspeak
an IRC chat for meetings
a forum chat normal discussions
a shoutbox
...
and a billion of other features

gallery images can not be displayed via bbcodes

We currently have a small problem with the creation of posts and threads on the portal.
The quick reply should still work... Ill try to find out whats wrong asap.