Important! Pls read

Quote from Crimson487

This is why i advice against using proprietary solutions. you are dependent on a company

but thats only one opinion

yep, one opinion
my opinion is very different from that when I look at how many different components have to be compatible, the support and most important the possibility to do upgrades without losing data.

cheaper is not better

Ive used other software before and I also use other software for other purpose right now.
Nothing else that I have tested so far offered the amount of the features that we need in a quality that Id like to see here.
Lets face it you of course can get a free Forum somewhere, maybe even a free CMS, a Gallery and a place to upload files... but wont find something free that reliably is able to connect all of that and provide professionaly group and access management (plus alot of other stuff).

There is a reason why software costs money and good work deserves to be paid.
I dont want to argue but free software would always be a step back... not forward. It means less features, less compatibility, less security and most likely not even the features that we need. It also could mean data loss with every update/change we do.

Anyways. Thank you for the donation

Ok, the upgrade took longer than I hoped for and was much more difficult than I expected.

It looks like the Portal databases have become a bit too big to be simply imported or updated.

I already started doing tests last thursday just to notice the upgrade is going to be a nightmare.

The original idea to set up the software and then import the data never would have worked due to the large database tables.

So I went with direct update procedure of the old Portal.

This procedure failed +20 times due to timeouts (I don`t understand why because I actually allocated more than enough memory and raised the execution times of the processes). Every failed try forced me to restore a backup (which easily took an hour).

In the end I managed to import the data manually bit by bit so that the upgrade routines could skip that part.

Actually it can be said that during the past 4 days I was busy restoring backups, trying to find a workaround for the problems and creating new backups as soon I made a little bit progress.

Ive spent the past 24 hours rebuilding data since this new software works very different. Every of the +400k posts had to be rebuild in order to recognize then new BBcodes, images and settings. Same was done with all user conversations, gallery items, blogs, filebase entries, etc.

The only place where I couldn`t do this procedure was the Lexicon (since that one works a bit different). It wont be hard change the syntax there since it only requires to edit and save the entries to apply the changes.

I have not done all the settings yet. Some new features are not active yet, others havent even been installed yet.

There is a clan management system which would allow clans to have their own member management and even individual clan forum structures. So far I didnt manage to install this feature. It could be that it is still a bit bugged since it was just recently released. I will try to get this feature running in a test environment later this week instead of messing up the Portal again. Another feature that has not been included yet is the chat.

That means, I had it included yesterday but then the server started to act pretty strange and crashed completely. I will try this in a test environment before I include that chat feature into the new Portal. I want to be sure that everything works and that I dont have to restore any backups anytime soon.

So what`s new?

• We have a new Portal wide editor which is working alot better than the old one.
• The Portal will be running alot more stable now, it is secure again and it will be faster. I will have to rebuild a 3 more datasets (I didnt manage to finish this yet since the rebuilds will take +12 hours for each dataset)... so later this week the Portal might respond very slow when I do the final rebuilds.
• We have an absolutely fantastic new News systems which will allow us to simplify the Forum structure.
• We have a new WIKI (which currently is empty) -> we will have to transfer the data from the old page by hand.
• Our gallery now has video support.
• We have a new Trophy system which partly can assign Portal related trophies automatically. Unfortunatly there was no way to automatically import the old trophies so I added all the trophies by hand today.
• We have a new Ticketsystem instead of the Bugtracker. The difference is that the management of tickets works alot better.
• The filebase is also new. It does not look as good as our old one but the plugin that restores the categorized view is already in development. As soon its available for this Portal version I will add it. The new filebase has a few benefits over the old one. It is possible to upload multiple versions of files into one entry and it also is possible to directly create a support thread on the forum for the filebase entries.
• The user profiles are alot better organized and have many new small features.
• Members will be able to link their google accounts, facebook accounts, twitter accounts etc. (once I did the setup for that)
• The Portal has a much better mobile support.
• We have a nice set of different styles (you can switch them at the bottom of the page).
• The Portal in theory can even push messages/notifications to your mobile phones.
• I love the new Timeline feature. I just need to feed it with more content. A history of this community.

What did we lose?

Yeah, it is also important to keep in mind that not everything was compatible.

• The Wiki entries could not be transfered. That has to be done manually. I made a backup of the old Portal which still contains all data.
• Personal notes. This is a feature which does not exist anymore. If you stores notes on the old Portal you should save that info locally. You can access your old user account at http://www.swat-portal.com/forumBACKUP/
• The Linklist is gone. To be honest I won`t really miss it. If we want we can simply create a new one with the new Portal features.
• The old Bugtracker is not compatible with the new Ticketsystem. That means I would try to transfer the unresolved entries and the suggestions by hand in the next few days. It doesnt make sense to transfer fixed bug reports.
• Downloads are missing. During the transfer of the downloads into the new filebase an error happened and I could not find a workaround for it. Only 200 of the ~1100 files have been transfered. The good news is that the entire filebase structure and the download descriptions were transfered correctly. So I only have to download the files from the old Portal and upload them again into the new Portal (and adding timestamps and number of downloads into the database).

Almost everything that failed to transfer can be imported manually. It just will take a bit time to do that. I dont think that we lost anything important.

The Portal upgrade isnt done yet... we have to do transfer the missing data, I have lots of settings to go through, I need to see if I can get the clan management running.

We should do some structure changes on the Portal (feedback is welcome).

There also might be small problems here and there with wrong translations or missing language variables. If you find such stuff it would be nice if you report that to me.

Btw. I copied the old FAQ today... I think alot of stuff is outdated there.

I think the upgrade was really the best choice (eventhough it was/is a painful procedure). It fixed many problems and will help us to shape the future of this community.

Test the new stuff, Tell me what you think.

you still can check the wiki on the backup link above

speaking of mobile support

Do we need a bright style just for mobiles? I would need to install one if required