Devops - TAW 3.0 Status Update

As the guardians of the development of the new website (TAW 3.0), we get asked a lot of questions in many forms and in many places, so here are some answers to common questions and a status update from DevOps.

Current status

We won't be able to give any time frame, as we don’t know what will happen in the future and don’t know what bugs will be found or how much time we each have week by week, but be assured that we are working hard. We have just taken on a few new staff as freelancers, so once they are settled and hopefully helping us out, we should gain a few extra hours a week of development time.

At this time we have the basic functionality for several of the fundamental TAW systems in place and still have 2 or 3 basic systems that need their functionality designed and coded. Which we will then expand upon as each new section is created and fleshed out

But that is not all, as we are working on the design for the entire website’s frontend. (the bit you as a user interact with) We are looking at quite a few different designs, as there are quite a few directions we could in. We will need to consider them all before settling on the final design.

Once we have settled on the final design, it needs to be built and applied to the website and all the integrated applications, such as the forums and wiki.

During and after all that we will need to do Quality Assurance, we will need to fully test each and every button and link and function. This is to prevent putting out a website that might end up with critical bugs in it.

Once all that is done and everything looks good, we will then have to migrate the entire user database over to the new website's database, test it and then deploy the website.

The first iteration will be called TAW 3.0, which will include all the base features needed to run and support the community. TAW 3.0 will be followed up with incremental updates (3.1, 3.2, etc.) which will contain enhancements and new features asked for by divisions and users alike.

Looking for volunteers

We are still looking for volunteers to help us out! We are primarily searching for developers, who preferably should have experience with AngularJS 1 and/or Node.js. The full list of technologies we are using can be found here. If you have experience with AngularJS 1 and/or Node.js and can spare as little as a few hours a week, please contact TigerFang, primestick or leroydev. You can contact us by emailing, sending a “conversation” message on the taw.net website or you can message / talk to us on TeamSpeak.

Frequently Asked Questions

Here are some answers to questions we get asked often

We get asked a lot about the ability to search for members, there are actually 2 ways to do it on the current TAW website, one is an actual search feature but it's actually only available to certain positions in TAW, and the other is to go to your own profile and edit the address bar where it says your taw name, change that to the exact name of the person you are looking for. This is a somewhat cheap work around and not a search function exactly, you would need to know their full and exact taw name but it can still come in handy.

We also get asked alot about responsive design, this is the term used to describe its ability to run on multiple platforms and devices, like tablets and phones. We are building a fully responsive website so that it should be availiable to all reasonably modern devices that you have access too.

we get alot of comments about how it will look and what sort of design we are going for, as i already touched upon, we are looking at several designs and we will make a choice once each one has been finished, there is a possibility in the future for the ability to select a theme for the website allowing you the user to choose how the website looks for you, but this is somthing we will look into at a much later time, it will take quite a while for just the one design to be made so there is no guarentee at this point. But that being said it will most likely be military in style as has been requested many times by the members, and considering the history of taw.