I've stated this many times before, but I'm rewriting the Gaia Tools site and it'll be v3. That's right, it's third iteration. Gaia Tools was the same from ~2007/2008 to 2015. That's when I took over managing the site from the owner and my friend WindPowa. Initially it was because of my capstone class to get my associates degree, but of course I had interest in building it out beyond the semester. This was the birth of GTools v2.
I redesigned the site and worked on it that entire semester. However, with a time crunch it didn't live up to what I was expecting. Basically I was envisioning the equivalence of a rocket ship and ended up with a CO2 powered science experiment. Well since then working on the site was mostly inactive. I worked on bug fixes here and there, and added a couple of things, but nothing really new and shiny. This was mostly due to my classes.
Fast forward to 2017, I started working on the site more in my spare. I did a lot of research about stuff to learn more. Then I came across a framework that is better than the one I was using at the time. This was around March or April, 2017, I quickly adopted the new framework and started rebuilding the site with it. It had a pretty big learning curve; it's very comprehensive, but has good documentation.
So fast forward to this year. I've really kicked it into high gear with redesigning Gaia Tools. It wasn't easy, design is one of my weak points; I'm a developer/programmer, not a designer. So, I adopted a design that I like.
With the front-end design pretty much taken care of I started working on the back end, the part that actually generates the site. With the new framework we can more easily add new features without bolting it onto the site and making a monster that's hard to maintain. We won't have to make any big changes to the back-end of the system now with this new framework, like how I did when switching frameworks entirely. This new framework is built with high quality.
One of the things that is exciting, we've really built up our development tools. We have switched our repository host to Bitbucket because it has all of the integration plugins we now use. We have added deep code analysis software to review our code for bugs and quality. We have added continuous integration and deployment software. We've added a lot of good stuff to our build process to clean it up and automate it. With all of our new software and some of our new rules and requirements,we can have better collaboration among ourselves.
After many, many months of rewriting the entire site to use the new framework, it's done — in terms of critical functionality that puts it on par with what the site currently has and then some — we're wrapping up adding important content. We've got some more content to add, but it's critical.
We think that users will find it much more appealing and friendly to use. So here with are with GTools v3 about to launch. We're just finalizing everything, and it's super exciting!
 Knight Yoshi · Tue Aug 21, 2018 @ 04:21pm · 0 Comments |
