The most significant change is under the hood.
Hello everyone, long time to chat. I hope everyone is doing well.
The Minecraft servers have not seen all that much action over the last year. More on that coming in a Year in Review post coming soon. Yeah I know it is nearly 2027 already but better late than never. This is precisely the reason I chose to redo the website on WordPress instead of keeping it as it was. Keep reading to learn why.
Changes
First, let’s get the changes out of the way. There are a few though nothing major.
- All content relating to past servers and anything that a player could contribute to has been moved to the wiki. This is to reduce the burden on my for editing and coming up with content, as well as allow players to contribute/modify/correct what is written.
- All posts from the old (12 years ago) Blogspot site have been archived here. Feel free to check them out, or don’t. I was a little excited about it and posted a lot and not much of it was useful. Though I suppose it filled a need at the time.
- Some modifications and tweaks to the website’s design elements and spacing around them.
That is pretty much it, I have been building this for the past month or so and I am happy to finally get to publish it. There may still be some changes coming up; WordPress makes editing much easier.
If anybody feels inclined to write content for the website let me know! I can set you up. It should at the very least be somewhat related to the TNTable community so keep that in mind.
Why
Now for the why. The previous website was running on Grav, an open source flat-file CMS. Read more about it here, when I redid the website last. I am now moving all the websites I help create and manage over to WordPress. I really struggled to fully adopt a different stack due to the lack of time available to dedicate to learning another framework properly. This lead to a lot of false-starts and decision paralysis in a way. I would never start any project because it was too large to tackle, and I would stop supporting the websites I currently had because upkeep took too much effort. So websites would be deployed and then decay. I wanted to replace them all before any became an emergency. Then I would really have a problem.
So I am moving everything to WordPress. I like it, the editor is plenty powerful for what I need, and there are a number of plugins available for the extensions of functionality I wanted.
The friction to begin a project on the website, or start writing a new post is gone. I will actually be able to write the year in review posts much closer to the conclusion of the year rather than 9-10 months and a website redesign later.
The Wiki
The wiki remains ever important. There was lots of content on the old website that did not need to be there, the information was sitting there dormant instead of being alive and available for anybody to edit, improve, and contribute to. Mainly the server descriptions, but also moderator biographies. The server pages have received a small overhaul on the wiki and no longer point to a blog post, instead there is a download link.
The server archive on the website serves as more of a timeline now with links to the wiki, map, and world download as well.
Anyways, that’s all for now, stay tuned for the year in review post, as well as an upcoming service launch that I am very excited for.