July 2023 Dev Log

Helloooooooooooo party people! As it's been a quite awhile since my last update, I figured another one was long overdue at this point. So what have I been up to?

Well, I'm still chugging away at the revamped Modrunner website, bringing it up to my personal standard and such. It's admittedly taken much longer than I would've liked, due to a combination of factors. Primarily of which is that I at one point pretty much scrapped all the work I had done up until that point so I could switch the tech stack I was using. Now this might sound rather counterproductive, and this is true, to a certain extent, but let me justify myself.

The current website has historically served as documentation for the bot, which it has done perfectly well. The current website uses a tool called Docusaurus, which is a framework for creating simple documentation-centric websites. However, since I want the website to be able to do more, like providing an online dashboard for managing the bot, this simplicity just isn't going to cut it for me. While Docusaurus does technically allow you to create pages with custom logic, which is one possible way I could approach building the dashboard, it's not really intended to be used that way and I don't particularly want to spend my time fighting with my tools.

So instead, I've elected to switch to a framework called Nuxt, used for creating full-stack web applications. In a nutshell, that means that it's a tool that contains all the bells and whistles I need to build the things that I want, and doesn't shoehorn me into a particular way of doing things. Rest assured that haven't thrown out all the work I've done so far. Nuxt still uses Vue to construct the user interface so I can still reuse a lot of the old code to save time and effort.

But back to why I scrapped a lot of my existing work - this is also a part of unifying various pieces of Modrunner together. Originally, the plan for the dashboard was that it was going to be its own separate website, which you could access using a link on the documentation. This would've gotten the job done, but I eventually decided that I wanted a cleaner and more cohesive experience, so instead I decided to rebuild a lot of the current website's functionality in Nuxt, so that the dashboard could be integrated better with the rest of the website.

The last part is about future-proofing. Thinking back to the original plan of having the dashboard nested within the current documentation website, doing this way means more work for me down the line. Updating something like Modrunner's styling would be a lot more work since it means I have to update two separate projects at the same time and be careful that I keep them in sync. Same goes for adding new functionality, I would need to update information in multiple places at once which leads to complication and complexity that I can eliminate by just having these two things, the dashboard and documentation, in one place.

So that's what's been happening in the world of Modrunner as of late. I believe that I can share a few new pieces and teasers of information about the new website itself, now that I have a fairly substational portion of it completed. The new website, once it leaves its initial beta period, will completely replace the current website in its entirely. I will likely keep the current website around for a little while just in case, but in time it will go away for good, so if you're particularly emotionally attached to it for whatever reason, I recommend you prepare yourself. However, don't worry! All the documentation that the current website hosts will be present in the new website. In fact, here's an image of what a document page currently looks like:

The homepage has also recieved a fresh coat of paint, although please ignore the giant placeholder image at the bottom (lol):

And lastly, the most important part, the dashboard has had most of its most subsantial work completed and is in a mostly working state. Most of the work that is left involve more mundane but nessessary stuff like tweaks to the styling and error handling. Here's an example of how looks now:

I appreciate that support that everyone has shown me in the recent months in terms of patience and reporting issues. Great software is always a group effort, so thank you. You help make Modrunner as great as it is as much as I do. We can celebrate a couple smaller milestones together as well, Modrunner recently surpassed being present in over 100 unique Discord servers! That also means that I was able to make Modrunner a verified Discord bot, so now it looks all official and stuff! Yay!

Once again, thanks and I appreciate the patience. Good things are coming!

-beansquared