Well, it’s been a long while since our last blog posts, and we do have some big updates for the project that we think should be communicated.
Read-only Platform
This time around, we are adjusting our plans to prioritize having a read-only platform ready as soon as possible, such that we can import data from Wikidot with minimal changes, and have the pages be mostly readable.
The reason this was determined is that we find Wikidot becoming more broken over time, the most recent example is the PageByTag module becoming non-functional for SCP sites (although the writing was on the wall — it was marked as deprecated in the Wikidot docs since forever). We see that the Wikidot developers (whatever’s left of them in this day and age) simply do not have the capacity to fix bugs other than the most serious security vulnerabilities, and instead prefers to disable non-critical parts of the site, perhaps also out of cost-saving reasons.
Now about our progress of this read-only platform, recent development work has been towards a legacy transition mechanism that allows a site or a page to choose its layout between the old Wikidot HTML structure or the new Wikijump layout. We tested different theme frameworks with the legacy layout, and the themes mostly do work where we maintain compatibility, at least for what we could see.
Since there are so many CSS themes on the SCP Wiki accumulated over time, we figured it would be take a large amount of effort to port them over to the new Wikijump layout, so it’s best not to tackle it at this stage with our extremely limited developer count. Instead, we would like to focus on the core features of the platform, and let the community help adapt their desired themes to the new platform.
More update posts
Since our last posts there have been quite a few people asking us for updates regarding Wikijump development. Previously we only posted when there are substantial or important updates that we really wanted to talk about, but it seems that it is unclear to the people interested that features smaller in scope and improvements are still happening in the back scenes.
So in the future, we plan to put out some short and less-polished blog posts that conclude what features are being merged in to Wikijump, without much commentary, but at a steadier pace such as by month. However, if you are really eager for the latest updates, you can always follow our development progress or join our Discord by asking for an invite on #site11 in SkipIRC or sending one of the developers a Wikidot DM.
