I'm sure everyone has noticed the new website and it's come along way since I installed it last week.  I wanted to put a quick explanation up of why I did all this and what we gain from it.

Basically the old forums were broken.  I messed up the installation of our portal software by trying to upgrade from an alpha to a beta which wasn't recommended and then I couldn't get it back to how it was.  For the end-user it was fine, but all of the controls for the front page, articles, side menus, etc. in the Admin panel were broken.  So we needed a clean install and this also gave me a chance to try out the new version of SMF and a different portal.  So that's how we got here.

I realise it's probably been annoying having to put up with me breaking the templates and causing erros when you're trying to post, hopefully we won't need to do that any more.

New features:

• Front page with new submission/commenting system and loot display.
• Side menu has useful info and links, and we can easily add things here like required mod links or whatever we want.
• New themes look much better than the old ones, especially the amazing logo that Khatum did!
• All the new stuff in SMF 2, a lot of it is admin stuff but you should see a few new things.
• Most importantly: the expandability of a working portal so we can add the loot tracker when it's done and whatever else we might need in the future.

Thanks to people who helped with testing and posting feedback: Mike, Khatum, Dan, Tim, Sam, Lei, Iso, Martin, James, Ian, and probably some I forgot!  And to everyone for being patient.

For me it was worth the effort and I hope everyone else agrees.  If not you get banned.

You can now respond to news posts and submit stuff to go on the front page, thought it might be fun/useful sometimes.  New items require an Officer to approve but anyone can reply to existing news.  Feel free to post PUGs or special events you're running so more people will know about them.

How does this magic work?  Go to the News Forum, or just click the link on any story.

The new website/forum is here.  Some things are missing at the moment, I'm working to get eveything in again.  Things to do, in rough order of priority:

• Light theme
• Menus & Front page
• BoTChan
• WoW stuff (item links, characters, etc.)
  

We have a new forum version and different portal software so some things may have moved around a bit but it's mostly the same.  You will probably find that your theme/style settings have been reset, you can set things up how you like them in your User CP.  If there's something you can't work out just ask.

Below you can see an example of the kind of auto-loot posting we can do.  The tags are messed up but hopefully you get the idea .

Please use the forum as usual, if you get any errors please wait 5-10 minutes and try again as it may just be me sorting things out.  Let me know if you see any persistant issues.

Any suggestions or comments are welcome, please post them here.  Thanks for your patience.

During Wrath of the Lich King you'll find all our loot automagically displayed on the front page.