I worked on the site a bit more today.

I remade the contracting system to make it much more intuitive and easy to understand. I also integrated a bit more with vBulletin to control usergroup membership from the Soacio control panel. Now when you change someone's position within Soacio, it will change their usergroup to reflect those changes.

My next step, which will be sometime tomorrow, is to add a "pledge" system with which we will be able to move players between lords and "Noble Houses" as the Republic has adopted. Tied in with this pledge system is the ability for the Duke to grant fiefs to lords and then for their coat of arms to be reflected as their profile avatar. A user's home "location" will also be changed to the fief in which their lord resides. Fief's will be tied to the Noble House system and also come with a management window for the lord to list his landed assets such as defensive and industrial structures.

After that its a few cosmetics and updates for the Republic, then I will begin porting everything over of the existing hardcoded features that work specifically for the Republic. I'm trying to make it all dynamic so I can have a database driven system for backgrounds, banners, images, etc.

The last big hurdle will be the integration into existing Duchy assets. We'll cross that bridge when we get to it though.

The final project after all this is done is the Ventrilo account creation system. Each user who registers and is approved as a full member will have a Ventrilo account and password generated for them to use on our server. This will allow us to do away with passworded servers so that we can engage in a "lockdown" should any others attempt to spam attack or harrass us. I hate redistributing passwords, so this way we'll be able to maintain a high level of security with little to no pain.

Once all these things are done ... I'm taking a vacation from the internets