Thought we should give a short update as to what has been happening behind the scenes - or at least behind the server rack!

This redesign has been very unusual to say the least. Normally these changes are conducted over a period of months out of sight of users and visitors and the final version kind of sprung on them as a fait accomplis with most if not all bugs ironed out. Because of the problems with the old site, you lot are in the unique position of seeing the process in action! Considering this has so far happened over a couple of weeks or less, I don't think we are doing too bad! After all, people like Egal and Wolfram have real jobs too!

To start with we have been designing templates for 3 separate pieces of software; Joomla 1.5, SMF Forum and Coppermine, two of which you have seen already. As much as practical we have been trying to match the templates together, or at least keep them sympathetic with each other. Each program uses very different template systems with greater or less degrees of success. We wont go into all the ins and outs (it would bore you rigid) but suffice to say it has posed its challenges!

The Coppermine template for the gallery is just about complete and we should get that up in the next few days. It uses elements from both the Joomla! template and the forum template, so should fit in fine.

There is the possibility to bridge Coppermine to SMF, which would be nice for everyone, but there are a few issues - not least of which is that apparently bridging destroys all existing albums! So we will have to think about that one rather carefully.

We still have to pull in information from the old server and change it to fit in with the new theme. These elements include registration/account management, shop and server status. We are starting to look at those bits this week and will let you know how we get on! As you know, it was decided to keep player registration separate from the web site for security reasons. However, this does give us one or two compatibility issues to sort out, so bear with us. (The learning curve is quite impressive too!)

We still have things to get right, not least of which is the email authentication on the forums. But Egal was last seen desperately tying knots in pieces of electric string, so hope springs eternal. We are also grabbing screen shots, so if you see Wolram floating around and asking people to pose in really weird ways, he is just doing his job ... honest.

Well, that is about where we are. Hopefully you will not see too many more violent changes from this point and we can all get back to enjoying the actual game - which is what all this is about!