The New Wiki! (CEP-JS)

[sudo-trans-pony]

Noticing anything different today with the wiki? Its now completely rewritten from scratch! With the recent changes of systems to move away from Hugo into pure JS and Python (calling this iteration CEP-JS), it was best to just go ahead and turn the wiki into a full Single Page Application.

Benefits of SPA?

1. The content is now structured much cleaner, and the raw files are whats being hosted- which means its much easier to handle on-site editing.
2. Seconds to compile! Its now just building the search index and some linkers, alongside checking for new news articles / forum users.
3. The site can update without needing a compile! Because the raw files are used for display, when a pull request is merged it will show up instantly (aside from your browser caching the old version)
4. Now that there’s no underlying systems, anyone can contribute a different ‘viewer’ of the same data. If you don’t like how I present the articles, you can add your own viewer without duplicating content or extending any compiling!
5. The same viewer concept means parameters can be added into URLs to change the site. I can now send you the same link to an article but append ?=cep-js or ?=theoryweb to tailor how its shown.
6. Sections of the site can now optionally load, so the 1000+ photos on the PTT article aren’t gonna try loading when you’re just reading the text.
7. Multiple articles can be parsed and fetched on the same page, this allows stuff like the link previews to return from the mediawiki days (they have)
8. No more shortcodes! instead of {{< wiki-link “1-Stage” >}} you just do [1-Stage]. Every shortcode has been converted on the site to this new format.

Downsides of SPA?

1. Can’t be indexed by search engines as easily. This is because site content is generated at load instead of just being fetched.
2. Pages may not instantly load like when they were static, but even on the biggest articles its maybe 2 seconds (might be longer if you’re international due to more stuff needing to be fetched).
3. Since everything is shuffled around old links to the site won’t work, its a newly generated set of links.

What’s new in the rewrite?

Lots of stuff!

Search

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  Search has been debloated and runs much better while keeping the same functionality. A new ‘Display’ option lets you pick between very large cards, a compact mode similar to how search worked before the update, and a ‘list’ mode that just displays raw titles for fast lookup. You can also now sort by most recently updated and viewcount.
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  The suggestions also now hint at the years of an article so you don’t have to guess picking the right page.
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  Images are also much improved, the whole site now properly loads the low-res version first- no matter what- and then starts to load the high res. This makes going through large galleries so much more tolerable.
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  Empty articles have now been improved too. Ones without thumbnails will now display a scrollable preview of the article text, while fully empty articles will display a random empty page visual.

Articles

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  First big change is pinned articles! You’ll get the intro pages by default, but any item can now be pinned to your homepage using a button in the top right of any page.
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  Articles also now have a view count displayed! This is the only thing my server runs that doesn’t locally keep track, but the viewcount file will also updated on the repository.
• Any of the auto-generated tables for locations and special articles have also been moved to the ‘Inventory’ tab, keeping the article text the main focus.
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  If you’ve been around since the Mediawiki days you might remember article previews on hover! The site now fully supports this.
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  Citations are also improved with a better layout for seeing what site you’re gonna be going to. Icons are cached on compile to prevent polling for embeds.
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  Market sales have been improved with a recent average price indicator alongside some additional info.

Users

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  Users have gotten some upgrades. First is a new quotes feature where you can fill out a list of phrases to randomly display when users hover your name.
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  User profiles have now been improved with a selectable banner and a proper way to show how many more contributions you need before you move onto the next rank.

Editor

• The editor now appears as the bottom right icon instead of settings. Editing has been cleaned up a bit more, so instead of tabs of parameters to sift through, you just add what parameters you need to the current list.
• Tags will now be suggested to you when typing in certain parameters, and thumbnails will display in the infobox so you can be sure its formatted right.
• Instead of each change being its own separate upload, the editor now keeps track of all your changes and will put them in one giant batch when you hit Save Changes. You can browse and delete your changes beforehand.
• Usernames and tokens have been moved to be next to the Save Changes button instead of in your settings. Once you implement your name you can edit your user page right from that menu.

Other

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  At the bottom of any page is where settings, stats, about, etc are located. With the new settings you can actually create a custom theme to use!
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  The ‘Nerd Stuff’ page also details every single download and citation on the whole site, which is really convenient for putting through some web scrapers to ensure none of these pages are ever lost as websites die over time!
• A lot of formatting of pages has been shuffled around and reduced for much easier parsing for those delving into the site. Parameters and content are their own files, and image articles + the actual image file are now in the same section. A lot of random parameters will also merged into just ‘tags’. For non-tech users, the biggest change is probably ‘cuDate’ being finally removed and merged into the remodels table, which now fills out the Concept Unification page correctly.
• Random articles now generate on refresh

What’s Missing or Needs Work?

1. Wiki stats aren’t implemented, im gonna revamp them with different charts later on.
2. The revamped showtape system (only present in 2 articles) isn’t implemented yet.
3. There may be some bugs with the editor, we’ll resolve them as we go.
4. Some of the custom elements of themes haven’t been re-implemented yet.
5. I forgot to do mobile CSS lol

[Gaberdoodle]

Awesome! Will the forums be getting these chnages.

[sudo-trans-pony]

Sorry for any disruption to the search, it was indexing pages wrong and this has now been fixed. I’ll note here any more fixes as they come in.

1. Implementation from @Stripes to have the old links redirect you to the new ones. Even though the wiki won’t really appear on Google because the pages are unindexable (i think), this still keeps the current links alive instead of confusing users.
2. Added a new ‘Manual’ at the bottom to have a place like Contributor Home to detail how the site works underneath.
3. Re-Added ‘Issues’ to the GitHub project
4. Fixed mobile CSS and added even more screen real-estate than the Hugo CSS

[Front-Row-Joe]

I noticed an issue where search doesn’t seem to update in tandem with the rest of the wiki. For instance, as of my last accepted pull request, Chuck E’s Duckies has four images to its name:

But when I search for it, only two show up:

I’m not quite sure if this is an actual bug or merely an unfortunate byproduct of the way the system is set up. It doesn’t seem to be a cache issue, as this behavior is consistent even on browsers that had never previously visited the wiki.

[sudo-trans-pony]

Great catch, looks to have been an issue with both my compiler and some differing characters between tags. Its been corrected (may need to reset cache to see the change)