Quick question... Is Just About entirely custom coded, or did you decide to use one of the existing community centric frameworks (either commercial like Xenforo, or open source like Tildes) as the jumping off point and stepping stone for creating the site?

I know that in the end, there will always be a lot of custom coding involved, but what's the reasoning for making the site entirely custom coded if that's the route that the site admin team decided to pursue?

Created at 3:32pm, 1st April, 2024. Page last updated at 2:42pm, 16th May, 2024.

This post has been edited by a moderator for the following reason: Rewording

FirestormGamingTeam 4/1/2024, 3:35:04 PM

I'm more curious about what prompted you to ask this question lol.

Prankster101 4/1/2024, 3:50:13 PM

FirestormGamingTeam

I don't know... I just found out about a new community website yesterday, and they were using a heavily modified version of Xenforo.

Just About feels a lot like that site... In that all posts are shown chronologically.

At the same time however, there's all these established community sites that are already firmly established, so it would be interesting to see as to what steps Just About takes to build its own community and to also differentiate itself from what's already out there.

BoomerMod4/1/2024, 4:10:17 PM

Hey Prankster101, this isn't my area of expertise, but our tech team might be able to share some info when we're back tomorrow.

RupertStaff4/1/2024, 4:20:55 PM

As Boomer mentions, the team will give a bit of detail on the tech implementation when they are back. We did decide at the very beginning that we needed to build quite a lot ourselves because of the way we wanted the rewards system to be integrated into the CMS/discussions etc... but whether that was the right decision or not, time will tell! :)

BTW, I'm going to edit the title of this thread down, because it's taking over the Live Feed bar! I think we'll implement a shorter limit on thread titles...

ThomasStaff4/2/2024, 9:23:43 AM

Hey Prankster101, we use a couple off the shelf tools but we don't use any specific forum software. The app is built in Node, with the front end using Next.js, a React-based framework. The back end is currently in the process of being rebuilt. The existing one was really more of a prototype that could be built very quickly but now we want something more scaleable. Ultimately the nature of any development is that you'll be using some third party tools, but the benefit of doing as much as we can in-house is that we have more control and visibility over what we want to do.