Hi to everybody in the MAK Community!

It's been quite a while since I did inform you of changes regarding to the MAK website. Well, one reason for that was, that I was (and I still am) terribly busy with my studies and therefore I haven't had the time to do a lot changes to the website or annonce all of them. Well, but now since the biggest changes we had planned are done I'd like to inform everybody of them. First of all, as many of you have seen already, we have succesfully set up an online teaching website. This time I was not involved so the credit for the new teaching website mainly goes to Ryan, Scott and Matt (and all the others who supported them by testing or anything that helped them getting the site running). You guys rock!

Alright back to the MAK website! Some of the changes I did are changing the gallery from the external gallery2 software which unfortunately caused some problems with password synchronization of the users. We moved to a fully integrated gallery engine which now works natively within joomla. If you experience any probelm with it, please let me know by sending an email.

Also I inserted a new part of the website, where single MAK members as well as Certified Member Dojos can use PayPal to pay their membership fees. You don't even have to worry about different currencies, since PayPal will do that for you. All you need is a valid PayPal account which happen to be freely available if you just want to use it for payment.

The next new feature is a private messaging system. Once you are logged in to the website you have the opportunity to send other registered users provate messages. You can be informed by email about new messages and generally you have quite a bunch of customization options. I did my best here to set up a good default so that not a lot of changes might be needed to be done by each one individually.

Last but not least I did the last step in having all functions natively built in into out website content management system. The forum which was also an external application bridged into the website was replaced with a new one that will integrate itself into out website layout. Unfortunately that means, we are loosing all out previous postings and topics as well as all the avatars, etc. Within the forum it's also possible to use the messaging system described above. So if you want to send an provate message in regards to a specific topic of the forum or just get in touch with somebody talking about a certain article he/she wrote the messaging system will support you in that!

So again, if you find anything not working of missing, please don't hesitate to send me a message and I will look for a fix asap!

Thank you all and enjoy the new website with it's new functions!

Best wishes to all of you wherever you are!

Christian Foeller

IT-Officer - Makoto Aikido Kyokai, Inc.