TAW 3.0 Vision & progress update

Vision for TAW 3.0 and beyond

TAW 3.0 will be a complete replacement of the current TAW website and its related systems. It will provide a faster, more modern user interface built around robust back-end systems. We will be able to modify the website to suit our future needs for many years to come.

There are four core requirements that the new website must meet before release.

• It must be able to do everything that the old website can do.

• Performance must be better than the old website.

• Discord must be supported to the same extent that TeamSpeak is. 

• It must be open to future expansions and modifications.

Features

For the release of 3.0 the majority of features will remain functionally identical to the current system. Of course these features will still be built from the ground up by our team to ensure that they meet modern standards and tie in well with the rest of the website.

New features will only be included in the first release of 3.0 for one of two reasons: If a feature is very easy to quickly implement or if implementing the feature after release would cause issues or cost extra time.

The Attendance & Events and the Email/Messaging systems have been completely reworked with many new features and improvements. More details on these systems will follow in future blog posts.

Performance

Performance is a high priority for 3.0. We could have all of the fancy features that we could ever want but if it took 5 minutes to load a page no one would want to use them. As such we will optimise the website to ensure optimal performance.

Discord support

Some time ago Discord was officially adopted as one of the primary voice chat providers of TAW. It is important to ensure that our members and units on Discord are able to enjoy the same features and support as their TeamSpeak counterparts.

Future expansions

Because the gaming world and TAW will continue to adapt we must ensure that the TAW website can keep up. This is why we have built the website from the ground up with future expansion/modification in mind. We will be able to add new features or modify existing ones with relative ease.

Development Timeline & Progress

When I joined TAW more than 6 years ago I was told that we would have a new website soon. 6 Years later the new website has not yet been released. I am sure that everyone would like to know the release date of the new website. Unfortunately we can’t give a release date because it is impossible to estimate. Our team consists entirely of volunteers working on the website in our spare time. This means that the amount of work we can do varies a lot depending on real life circumstances.

While we can’t give a release date we can provide a high level historical overview of our progress from the start of this project on the 8th of May 2021 to today. This should give you an impression on the work we have done so far. Please note that this timeline is non exhaustive and some items may be missing.

The graph below shows the current status of all of the current and planned components of TAW 3.0. As you can see we have made a lot of progress over the last two years.

It is important to note that not all components require the same amount of work to complete. Even if a component is marked as complete there may still be some work that needs to be done if any issues are discovered during testing. There is also some work, such as testing and deployment, that needs to be done but doesn’t really fit into any of the components.

Future blog posts & questions

In the future we will be releasing more blog posts that will go into more detail on individual components and features.

If you have any questions, comments or suggestions feel free to reach out to the either FlyingDutchMan [CC SEC] or Samblues [CC SELC]