New site

Hi all!

We've been working on a new site in the background for a number of years. What happens is this:

• We get started and implement a bunch of features, but then lose steam and don't see it through. 
• A year or so goes by and someone gets interested again, goes through the same process and then everything tails off. 
• Wash, rinse, repeat.

Not this time.

We are using Patreon partly as a development blog and partly as a way for us to publicly promise our loyal users - the new site will be coming. We hope to have a public beta running this summer, and a tentative release date of Christmas 2019 for the real thing.

Creaky Floorboards

The codebase of the current site is really quite old and can be troublesome to make changes to - this is probably the main reason why we've not released anything particularly new for so long. Where we've needed to make changes, we have had to dust off our old code, think to ourselves "why?! how?! what?!" and then get on with whatever we needed to do.

Anyone who has come back to a legacy system after a few years will understand how time consuming that can be...

Solid Foundations

cubeupload version 5 (according to my fairly sketchy version tracking) is being built on top of the Laravel PHP framework which lets us break down the site into easier to manage chunks. New features can be developed quickly, and we can adopt a true client/server model with better separation between frontend and backend.

Vue.js will be making a welcome appearance. Personally I'm not a great frontend developer and the mess of jQuery I was coming up with made no sense, so Vue is a natural progression.

Server-wise, we'll more than likely run the new site on the same platform as we have now, unless our Patreon backing increases enough to let us run the new stuff on a cloud provider such as DigitalOcean. I'd love to not look after a physical server sitting somewhere in Hetzner. I do enough of that in my full-time job...

Next Steps

The short term plan is to see where we are from the most recent development run. Last I remember, the backend was progressing well and a good frontend proof of concept had been completed, including an image gallery, albums, public/private profiles and a few other goodies. 

A lot of the frontend features were developed ad-hoc with some worryingly fast pace which led to some bizarre parent/child relationships in terms of components. These are going to be re-done in a more sensible manner. Once that's completed, I think we can look at a public beta.

Please do consider supporting us here on Patreon. I will be frequenting our new Discord server when I'm not fighting with VMware hosts in my regular job, so feel free to drop in and have a chat.

Tom