What is Kuulaportti?
Kuulaportti is a free* registration system used for airsoft events. It was originally developed by Ehasa for our own needs. We noticed that checking in several hundred players for events using only paper or excel spreadsheets was tedious. Laziness won and we decided to develop a system that would help us.
Currently Kuulaportti has numerous features that make the everyday life of game organisers easier.
You can easily add your team, vehicles and game area to the Kuulaportti. As a game organiser, you can quickly create different games, from small weekend games to large events.
You can also include your registration and event data on your site through an easy API interface.
We have added screenshots of the Kuulaportti on this page, from which the functionalities are easier to see.
* Kuulaportti costs 20 € per year for teams that organise events.
Development of Kuulaportti
Kuulaportti has been developed irregularly since 2011. In practice, the development has been guided by Ehasa's own need to have a certain feature or functionality.
Current state
Currently, Kuulaportti is used by more than 20 different associations and teams in Finland. It is being developed taking into account the needs of associations and players.
Kuulaportti beta
Over time the codebase became outdated, after all it was originally developed in 2011. In the early years of battlegrop events, Kuulaportti was kept in a working order ugly fixes. Finally in 2020 it was time to start reamake the whole system. The new Kuulaportti project was started at the end of 2020 and quicky released for beta in 2021. Part of the beta testing was to use it for our TSTOS 21 and Conquest events. At the same time, we had to give up with the old Kuulaportti, as it speed had slowed down significantly over the years.
New interface for the Battlegroup events
We realized at the time of TSTOS Parola that if we want to get international customers, using Kuulaportti through google translator is probably not the best idea. However, developing a new system didn't sound that enjoyable idea at the time. We decided to solve the problem by building an interface for registering battlegroup events. The data was still stored in the old kuulaportti, but the user interface was customized for each battlegroup event. This is how we got the translations working and were able to accept vehicle registrations. However, the interface was deliberately implemented a bit hastly and all kinds of modifications to eg. factions and options, could break the registration form.
New colors
Over the years, team registration was added to the system as a bigger feature, where one team member could register all members. The appearance was also slightly updated, but the same old system was still at the bottom.
Dynamic content
The next version of the Kuulaportti was decided to be developed in such a horry that it was completed just for the Strawberry hills 2012 event. Naturally, the opening of ticket sales for the event was also delayed by a couple of hours, when we found a system breaking bug. The difference from the previous version was the dynamic content. Our purpose was to make a system where you can easily publish events from weekend games to big scenarios.
First version of what later became Kuulaportti
In the beginning, Kuulaportti was quite rough and contained only one hand-coded form that served only a single event at a time. The player list was extracted from the database as a very raw text and it was not really tedious to customise the form in any way.