2024 TNTable Website Update

A whole new look and new backend for the TNTable Website, built on Grav! A modern, flat-file CMS.

Hello lovely people, it has been a long time since I have posted an update. I have exciting news today, as you can see, there is a brand new website! It is still a work in progress so things may change. The motivation for this change is to make it easier to create new posts on the website, as well as have complete control over the design. This comes with some drawbacks, things may not render correctly for everyone on every device for now. I will be working on that slowly. Let me know if anything looks funky for you so I can fix it.

The design of this website has been built from the ground up by me, no templates or anything, just HTML, CSS and Twig with Grav.

The nitty-gritty details

For those interested in the details, I used to build this website with Hugo, it is a powerful static site generator, but it is overkill. I did not have enough time to learn how to use Hugo and make custom Hugo templates & themes unfortunately. I found myself spending more time fixing things rather than writing posts and updates that I wanted to create. I also tried Wordpress but it was a little too heavy for this use, and very restrictive when it comes to post types. Then I tried 11ty, which is also a static site generator with an easier to use template and theme creation process. But I still wanted something that made it easier to create new content and that would let me do it from an interface online.

Enter Grav: A flat-file CMS with an easy to learn, but super powerful template and theming language. It takes the best of a CMS, meaning content it easier to create online through an interface, and combines it with the ease of customization seen in 11ty.

That is all for now about the website, now I have a little announcement about the SMP server.

SMP Map Reset

Yes, it is official! The SMP map is being reset after two and a half years it is time. With the additions in Minecraft 1.21 it only makes sense. There is going to be a post explaining all the changes coming to the server, as well as all the new things in Minecraft from the past few version so keep an eye out for that.

That is all for now, looking forward to seeing all of you on the server, launching on July 31st 2024.

-David