Jackson H - 820457 Posted December 13, 2015 Share Posted December 13, 2015 We hope you enjoy the surprise the team have delivered you today. The maintenance we mentioned in an earlier post is not just maintenance but the roll out of a complete new web presence. Everything is shiny, new, and different. Following the difficulties we had earlier in 2015, as well as dissatisfaction with the previous website, we have been working behind the scenes for some time to deliver you a much better, far more functional VATPAC web site. Each of our major sections (Operations, Training, Events, Forums) are in their own discrete section, but with easy navigation between them. We have reviewed all the information we have, had, and thought we needed and made decisions on what actually should be on the website. We have more things still in the works, but from today most of what you need is already available. The Operations pages contain full listings of all frequencies and positions, not just in Australia but throughout the South Pacific. We have our full sector file library. Thanks to our friends at VATNZ we also have a version of the Oceanic Reporting Tool which will allow you to easily put together an Oceanic report in the correct format. We thank them for sharing this with us. The Training pages have been updated to the latest version of Moodle, and training requests are moving to a ticket based system. This will allow people to see where they are in the queue and hopefully reduce the amount of angst that the wait for training to commence often seems to generate. The Events pages also detail all our regular recurring and special events. They should contain all the details needed to participate in each and every event, as well as the next events being clearly displayed on both the Events and Main pages of the site. Booking forms for major events will be put up as required. The suggest a flight form is still there. The Forums. The Forums are now much more tightly integrated into the whole VATPAC web portal. We have VATSIM SSO enabled which allows people to log in using their VATSIM ID, which will remove one of the recurring sources of confusion for newcomers. We are also able to much more easily have relevant forum posts appear on the front page of the site. Finally all the other things you have been used to using in the past are still there as well, all moved to their new home: ATC Assist, Pilot Assist, VATPAX. All of this has taken an enormous amount of effort. We started scoping this project in August, critically examining which packages to use (we have changed several packages, notably the CMS used for the website and the forum software), as well as looking at finding better ways to prevent a repeat of the disruption we suffered earlier this year. At first only the Board were involved in this process, and as it has developed we have brought several of the senior staff into the inner circle. I want to thank all of them for managing to keep this entire undertaking under wraps pretty much right up until today. A special mention goes to my fellow Directors who have all worked tirelessly to bring this project to a successful conclusion. An even bigger thank you goes to Zach Biesse-Fitton. I can now officially announce that Zach is our Deputy Director of IT (VATPAC14). Zach has put an enormous amount of effort in designing the new website, and putting together the CMS implementation, porting the forums to their new home (ensuring that none of our corporate knowledge was lost in the process), moving Moodle and VATPAX, and a million other little tasks to get this over the line. So explore and enjoy. We expect there will still be one or two little wrinkles to iron out, so if you find something that's not quite right let us know and we'll try and get it fixed as soon as we can. Jackson ----------- Director of Division VATPAC Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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