Site Update Notes - March 18, 2024

Today's patch notes are a summary of updates that have gone out to the website over the past few days.

You can view our previous patch notes for March 12 here.

New Features

Backend

• We have upgraded the framework our site runs on, Django, to the latest 5.x release.
  • We have been running on a much older version of Django and it was no longer going to be receiving security fixes for much longer.
  • Additionally, there are some nice performance and developer improvements to the framework, so upgrading was a no-brainer.
  • This is by far the largest upgrade of our codebase that has ever taken place and has been in the works for a while.
• We have also upgraded our version of Python to the most recent stable version.
  • There have been some huge performance improvement to python over the past couple of years and now we are taking advantage of that.

Editor

• We have updated our editor to a new version for an improved experience on mobile.
  • Our custom plugins for bbcode will be making a return shortly.
• You can now access "templates" in the editor (rubber stamp icon).
  • This is where our "quote bbcode" is going to live going forward. It better showcases the usage of it.
  • More templates for common formats folks post about will be introduced as it makes sense.

Static Assets

• Work has been started on improving our JavaScript and CSS load times.

Articles

• We have a new look for our article pages which includes a sidebar.
• Article listings (View All News) have a new look.

Bug Fixes

General

• Fixed an issue on several pages where pretty lists with selectable icons no longer had their icons.
• Fixed jobs that calculated our hot scores.
• Fixed an issue where people were unable to leave comments.