As I move forward, trying to work with WordPress is getting tedious. I already see it’s doing some things exceptionally well. Other things about it are just atrocious. So, a tracc.eu website update is coming … at some point.
WordPress is Great … Except for when it isn’t
WordPress is pretty much the most extensively customisable suite while also being very easy to learn and understand. That’s great and I am thankful for it to allow me to easily publish some of my first websites using it.
However, even now I am already seeing the limitations of the system.
I keep on reading online that the more content you have on WordPress, the slower the websites become. Not only the frontend that you all witness, but also the admin backend. And especially the latter part has been aggravating recently.
So, tracc.eu will be switching away from WordPress.
I have started prototyping a full custom website update. When will it come? No idea. For now we’ll stay here.
Technology-wise, I am currently prototyping with a headless CMS. That means all website programming and design is custom, but there is an API connection to a tool that allows new content to be added into the databases. In my opinion, that helps streamline the process of getting new content onto the website as well as alleviates a bit of development demand.
New Features for Championships/Racing are Planned
I would like to use the SimGrid API to display certain statistics after the website update. Stuff like automated full team championship standings, top times that have been done per car/circuit combo in our community, potentially leaderboard challenges and so forth.
For that, however, I will first have to research how to handle the privacy aspect of that. Since we are not collecting and displaying that data right now, you didn’t have to accept any data collection agreement for lap times. So, to be fair to all past and current participants (and for us to be legally safe) I will have to research how past data could be used or whether the displayed data would only start at a certain point. If anyone has knowledge in this part, please reach out to me on discord.
I think it would be a neat idea to make the website interactive for championship participants and to offer a bit more through it.
You Can Have Input, Too!
This website, of course, is not only for my sake. It’s supposed to be for the sake of everyone in the community. So, if you have any ideas, requests, opinions on the new website, feel free to reach out. You can reach out either by directly messaging me on discord or by suggesting features in the đź’ˇ-suggestions-feedback channel on our discord.
Yeah, I think that about does it for now. Sorry for the lack of articles in the past few days, you did get quite a lot of video content on our YouTube channel, though!