During the last weeks tobi and i have prepared the long awaited update of antville.org to the current release of Antville 1.1. After several hundred lines of code (we developed a separate application to be able to find out the differences between the current version and the one we're updating to) we're nearly ready to go.

However, we need your help (besides your patience): for the time of the few next days we've set up a preview site here on project.antville.org.

What we're asking from you is to have a close look at your own site and those that you know, and tell us about things that don't work anymore or are different than they used to be (besides all those wicked new features of antville). You can access any site using the following url schema:

http://project.antville.org/preview/[site-alias]/

e.g. the preview of http://alo.antville.org can be accessed via http://project.antville.org/preview/alo, the preview for http://arrog.antville.org is located at http://project.antville.org/preview/arrog, and so on.

Please don't worry if some images can't be found or the like, or if you're seeing the infamous count maximum thread: the server running project.antville.org is much smaller and slower than elise, so it's having quite some hard time, even with this preview.

Just to give you an idea about the complexity of the update: currently the database of antville.org contains about 20.000 skins and more than 800.000 stories/comments. Nearly all skins and about a tenth of the text content must be modified during the update to accomplish all the changes in the source code of the application (remember: the current software version on antville.org dates back more than one year ...).

However, we did a close analysis of what's in the database (yes, we've seen it all ;-) and tried to preserve all of your layout modifications. But since we had to modify that much data, chances are that our conversion scripts did something unwanted, so that's why we're asking you to have a look before we close our eyes and press the button ...

Our current timeplan is to update antville.org on the next weekend (presumably Sunday). The update itself will take several hours, so expect a longer downtime then.