· Gruntlord6 · 3 min read
New Site Design and Overhaul
D2K+ has finally finished the move from Wordpress to Astro!
Although I am still applying layers of polish to the site, the technical work is done and the site is already in a better state then the previous one.
Menus and layout are greatly improved, with a careful attention taken to making sure the site is responsive to different screen sizes. I am working on trying to bring the D2K+ flair the old site had back, but right now this is what I have to work with. If you have any SVG images you think you would work with the new site deisgn please let me know.
The mod submission process is also greatly improved, and the site overall is significantly faster and easier to maintain. This is important as support for automatic mod installation through a desktop application is something planned for the future.
Feel free to let me know what you think in the Discord or forum, or by using the contact form.
Technical Details
I wont go into too many details as this was very similar to the move made over at GruntMods (click here to read about it) but there was a unique set of challenges that came up when adapting D2K+.There was a lot more to move, as D2K+ has almost 10 times the amount of pages that GruntMods has. Since we accept user generated content this will only continue to increase. This meant a lot of content needed to be adapted to a new template.
Pages did not have any consistent structure, as most of the features such as Mod Authors and having three preview images were added after the initial versions of the site.
Many of the sites graphics are static images, such as the wonderful former logo. These look great but don’t have any ability to scale with larger and smaller screen sizes, which is an issue I had to tackle when dealing with page responsiveness.
Astro does not have any real sidebar component designed to be used on the main nav layout. Starlight has one but is a very specific theme made for documentation. Other component libraries that were investigated did not meet our needs either, requiring a unique design from scratch.
We accept user submitted mods and tools, so we needed a cloud based submission system not directly tied to the front end site (which is static html)
Because we have so many pages and only expect more, we needed to develop a system to dynamically update the sites routing and menus
These issues took some time to resolve (and a lot of testing), but now that they are in place I am quite happy with the results.