Tuesday Topics #59: Website Happenings II

Published by Loren

Loren talks a bit about what he's been up to on our websites.

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Introduction

Hey everyone, this is Loren from Donut Team and welcome to another Tuesday Topics!

While The Butter Apple is hard at work on the next update to Jeff's Map Creator, I'd like to talk a bit about what I have been up to in regard to our websites!

Adopting new technologies

As always, I am working to improve my workflow and the technology stack used for developing our websites.

Most recently, I have adopted using TypeScript in my code for a better development experience and better code maintainability.

I'm also in the process of switching from Sequelize to TypeORM to make it easier to work with our database. I have been aware of the latter for a while but it essentially requires TypeScript to use effectively, so it wasn't really an option before.

These two changes alone are quite a shift in how I work on things for Donut Team's various websites, but they have already been a huge boon to my productivity.

New user profiles

On that note, I am working on the next iteration of our homepage which will finally feature the new user profiles I discussed way back in Tuesday Topics #26!

The version I'm working on now has been rebuilt from the ground up but retains many of the same design principles. That is, I am aiming to maintain the bulk of the features found in the legacy forum profiles while also giving you new ways to make them your own and providing new areas to showcase your contributions to the community.

These profiles, as well as the new account creation and log in pages, will also be built directly into our main website (Link hidden by Safety Tunnel) instead of living on a separate subdomain as discussed in TT26.

All that said, this iteration of user profiles are quite "under construction" at the moment, but I will at least show you some preview images of the new profile header:

new profile header

Some community veterans might remember profile banners from a very old version of the forum profiles.

new profile header

new profile header

New moderation dashboard

Another thing I am working on is a new moderation dashboard for our moderation staff members which will enable them to more easily moderate our various websites.

I don't see much reason to show off this dashboard in a public setting, but it has already helped us with a new panel for configuring Donut Bot's automatic moderation settings. :)

Conclusion

That's all for this week. I hope you enjoyed this week's Tuesday Topics, we'll see you again in two weeks!

- Loren from Donut Team

P.S.: Borb wants you to listen to this and Mochapoke wants you to listen to this.