Well, it's finally ready. The "Big Upgrade" that we've been touting for months is finally ready, and will be deployed Sunday June 1st Starting around 11am CDT. Expect downtime to be around 6 hours.

After the required revisions to every major section of the site, we've finally completed this particular upgrade. The essence of this upgrade is to seamlessly allow multiple guilds and multiple games on a single site. These changes have added an entirely new wave of functionality, which has extended well into the single-game-single-guild websites as well, particularly in the way of custom rosters.

Here's the detailed list of what is getting deployed.

1) Multiple Games can run on a single site. If your guild plays both Age of Conan, World of Warcraft, and Team Fortress 2, the site can easily handle this, and it can all be done from the Admin menu, creating the multiple games, and the characters for each game separately, each with their own set of classes, races, tradeskills, keys and attunements and item links.

2) Custom-defined games. Say, for example, that you play a game that we do not currently have default support for, such as "Hello Kitty, Island Adventure", you can simply create that game, and give it the necessary information: Level Cap, tradeskills, classes, and races, as well as defining certain aesthetics for the game, such as whether or not tradeskills are called "Professions", "Tradeskills", "Crafting Abilities", or if the game itself doesn't even have tradeskills at all, they can be outright omitted.

3) Custom Rosters, with designated admins each specific roster. While every guild will have their one main "Guild Roster", if you have members from other guilds on your site, you can create a roster specific for them. Or let's say you have 3 different raid groups in your guild, you can create a custom roster for each, so that you could easily look up to see "Who's in Raid Group B?" The other big bonus of the custom rosters is multiple guild rosters, allowing you to easily separate which members are members of which guilds. This makes guild-alliance sites much easier to manage and display as expected.

4) The event signup process has been completely rewritten, allowing for admins to modify existing signups beyond changing their signup status. Admins can change another user's signed up character, or sign up for events manually for them. You can limit signups to a specific custom roster (if you only want members from "Raid Group B" to sign up for X event), or if you have a set of members who are ALWAYS on, and you prefer to have your members tell you only if their going to miss the raid, you can do this as well, also powered from a custom roster. There is now also a change history for signups, so you can see which user changed his or her signup, which signed up for whom, etc.

5) If signups were done in "Role Mode" you can actually now see how the signups were done role-wise after the event started (this is long overdue).

6) The manual DKP recording process has been seriously revamped to be much faster. A common complaint was having too many characters on the DKP raid entry page. This has been solved by allowing you to tie a DKP System to a custom roster, which will limit the visible users to just that roster. Beyond that, the pages have had usability improvements and aesthetic tweaks (for example, mass deletion of items has been implemented).

7) User-defined fields were added. This means that you can add custom fields or questions on character profiles and login profiles. For example, for a game like Team Fortress 2, you can add an option for "Favorite Class" or "Favorite Map".

And of course, there were lots and lots of sections that needed revisions to accommodate these changes: importers, applications, tradeskill lookups, character profiles, etc.

Again, this is going to be deployed this Sunday, June 1st, starting 11am CDT, and is expected to be finished by 5pm that day. As always, we'll try to finish it earlier.

We appreciate all your patience in the time it's taken to complete this project - it has completely monopolized all other upgrades we'd like to do. But now that it's finished, the rapid updates to which you've become so accustomed will be returning. Our first project once this is finished is a revamp for the forums, which is expected to be ready before the end of June.

Thank you all for being a part of the DKPSystem.com network, and we hope you will all love the new changes.

It took an hour and a half longer than expected to deploy the patch today, and for the inconvenience, all accounts have been credited an additional week.

As for the patch details, more will be on the way, but here's the summary from the newsletter sent out Thursday evening:

I am having problems with a couple of things since the patch.
1. very slow load up and loading from page to page.
2. popups are not working. (Event Calendar, Item Stats, Admin)
3. Players names in log in menu not aligned well.

Simkin Storm
The Isengard Order

3) Custom Rosters, with designated admins each specific roster. While every guild will have their one main "Guild Roster", if you have members from other guilds on your site, you can create a roster specific for them. Or let's say you have 3 different raid groups in your guild, you can create a custom roster for each, so that you could easily look up to see "Who's in Raid Group B?" The other big bonus of the custom rosters is multiple guild rosters, allowing you to easily separate which members are members of which guilds. This makes guild-alliance sites much easier to manage and display as expec

hey chops i love this feature most of all...heres is my problem though..i've already created a custom roster but can not seem to make it work with existing dkp systems. I go into the current dkp systems and pick my custom roster say save...site says it's saved but doesn't actually save it... does this feature only work for new dkp systems?

I went to set up a new roster for my 50's and when i click "Quick Add" it tells me to "Coose a member from the drop down list". I am not seeing a drop down list, only a 'Add New Member" link.

Having an issue where I'm being given an Alert for a Pending Roster Enrollment Request.

1. very slow load up and loading from page to page.
2. popups are not working. (Event Calendar)

I've only been a customer for a short time, but I am VERY impressed with the level of service you and the DKPSystem.com team have delivered. GREAT JOB! Grab a beer, and relax, you deserve it.

I've done uploads from the armory, to populate two rosters. However, the "Armory Settings" menu only has one set of fields. I'd like to have both of my guilds maintained by the Armory loader... even though only one guild is listed in this single set of fields, will the 'armory auto updater', keep both guilds characters up to date?

Second, a few of our players have started playing Age of Conan. Are there plans to add AoC as a game in the game menu in the near future? If no, if I have our players start doing the data entry, can you export the data somehow, and allow it to be shared so others can quickly get AoC sites running?

Fixed.

Holy Shemollies!! Great work Chops (and crew?)!!! Amazing stuff.

One thing. My officers can't approve applicants anymore .. what changed in regards to this? Couldn't find it in the feature access.

Yes, I'm having the same problem. I have people to approve or deny and I may have to send them an email from my personal address.

Should be fixed. Give it a shot.