You know the feeling when all hell breaks loose, as it did a month ago.

The Tech Haven Network has had one of the biggest revamps in it’s history. I didn’t manage it all on my own, I have to thank quite a few people, such as Cmaster and Tratos Skarn, and also the rest of the Neocron community.

When did it all start? On 6th September, FN of http://nc.synergyxr.net announced he was calling it a day with his resource site, and it was to close in a few days. His reasons, you will have to ask him. Now Neocron players know this is one of the websites you go to when you need to know how to do a quest or you need information about an item. So the community panics a little, and people start to step in. The THN community helped and stepped in, by copying the guides onto the forums, and Cmaster, Tratos and Pepsi helped by putting the guides into Joomla.

Now Joomla out of the box has a horrid URL scheme, even with search friendly URL’s turned on. It’s not Joomla’s fault by any means, it needs to be like that so it can work. Howevere there are Search Engine Friendly URL generators available, which turn http://www.monolight.org/component/option,com_frontpage/Itemid,1/ into http://www.monolight.org/home/ The one I used was OpenSef  which very quickly turned unfriendly URLS’s to nice friendly URL’s.

Then came the task of the Items Database. FN of SynergyXR let me have the database dumps, so that got loaded into the DB…

…but FN didn’t wish to supply the code to read it, which I can perfectly understand. So time to write a Joomla component to read the data and display the data. That wasn’t too hard, just there was a lot of code refactoring and starting at the data, trying to understand how FN had organised his data.

I had to do quite a few SQL refinements to get all the data in, as doing left outer joins on data for 3-8 tables can be a MySQL db killer. So it was a case of keep the left outer joins on the main data, and have separate select everything queries for the other tables, and store the data in the object.

The Items DB has been online for a good 2 weeks now, and it’s still having tweaks to the 1.0 version. 1.1 will have the ability to edit and add items.

Also there were a few other components added as well, like Joomap, Facile Forms, and Easy FAQ.

So, the THN is now a resource site as well, but it didn’t end there, as ReaKKtor approached the THN and asked if we like to consider being an Official Fan site. After some discussions with SnowCrash I was happy it was the right direction for the THN to go. After checking a few technical issues on Bandwidth and server resources, we hit the go button!

Since the THN has become an official fansite, and one of the main resource sites for Neocron, naturally the traffic has increased by a factor of 3, with peak traffic being on a Saturday, so I have to keep in mind not to do any risky updates on peak days! I do take steps to make sure that nothing breaks, by having a development server at home, then a separate test site URL on the main server with copies of the main data. And of course the source code is held in a Subversion repository, so I can roll the code back if needed. (Which I’ve had done a few times, when unexplained bugs have crept in)

So now, what’s next on my grand list? Next step is to get the Items DB update form working, and then work on the Rares DB version 2.0 which has stalled as a result. Then I’ll be back onto the FF1GP coding until March 2007.

Then next year, there are 2 big updates to do, phpBB3.0 and Joomla 1.5. I’ve installed the Joomla 1.5 Beta, and I got to say I’m very impressed with the work they have done, both in the code which is really clean and the user interface.

PhpBB3.0 is also coming along nicely, the code is much cleaner that the old phpBB2.2 code, and it’s also has a considerably revamp user interface.

Until my next coding blogg... take it easy!