Hitting Pause on Feature Development

I’ve made the decision to halt feature development for a few months. WCL/FFL is starting to show its age and I need to rebuild it using more modern frameworks and technologies.

When I first began developing the site in 2012, there was no Electron. Laravel was in its infancy. More modern front end JS frameworks did not exist yet.

Fast forward to 2018 and the foundation of WCL is getting rickety. The site is on an ancient version of the Laravel framework (it’s kind of a miracle that I have gotten Laravel 3.x to work on PHP 7.2)…

The client uploader application is written using Adobe AIR (a technology that has essentially been put into maintenance mode) and needs to be rebuilt from the ground up using a better technology like Electron.

The JS front end is all hand-built, depending largely only on JQuery, when there are probably additional technologies that could be used to ease development.

What this means is I’m effectively freezing WCL/FFL as is and am going to work on rebuilding the site. I’ve divided this plan into roughly four stages:

(1) Move the front end from Laravel 3.x to Laravel 5.6. This is a slow rebuild, but it will give me the opportunity to make some requested changes as well, that include:
(a) Moving from my third party authentication framework to Laravel’s built in Auth. This will enable people to be logged in from more than one device at once (something I know people have complained about often).
(b) Making sure all of the strings are localizable.
© Adding CSRF protection to all the forms on the site.

(2) Make a new client uploader using Electron. This new uploader will be unified and be the same uploader for all four games (WCL, FF, WildStar, Rift). It will also be fixed to be localizable.

(3) Localization. Once everything has become localizable, I’d like to focus on getting quality localizations in place for all of the languages supported by the various games.

(4) UI refresh. Rebuild the JS front end and get rid of the cruft. This can happen in stages.

The Electron rewrite of the uploader is an independent project and could in theory proceed in parallel with everything else if there are people interested in helping out with that effort.

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