FrontierNav Weekly: 29th June 2020
Changes
- Relationships can now be sorted by any property. That is, properties of either entity or the relationship itself.
- Added a game-level Entity Type page to easily navigate to Data Tables and other guides for the current Entity Type.
- Login email is now visible in user settings for anyone wondering how to login using their email without going through a social media login.
- More progress towards releasing Lists & Boards.
Newly Added Games
Xenoblade Chronicles
- Added affinity points when gifting collectibles to party members.
Support the project
This week, FrontierNav has 1 new patron: Ghil!
Thank you to this month's patrons!
Michael Rademakers, Sebastian Tasto, Chuang Sing Kee, 777, Chad Bishop (ArlandSr), Aloftheabove, Roadrunnerto, Nightshade, Mario Carmona, Hex, Pussel W, yeili, Ghil and 2 anonymous patron.
If you would like to support FrontierNav, please consider donating on Patreon. Doing so helps fund development and keeps the project going. Thank you.
Login Emails and Notifications
When FrontierNav started, it only allowed logging in through a social media provider. However, in the long term, this can cause issues with maintaining compatibility and verifying accounts. Which is why I later introduced Email Link logins. Email Link logins will eventually be the preferred login approach as it decouples FrontierNav from third-party services.
Accounts that login through social media will still be supported as not everyone checks their email. However, some of these services don't provide an email address, so if FrontierNav no longer works with one of them, it'll prevent those users from being able to login, as they won't have an email assigned to their account.
So, I'll be introducing a way to optionally provide an email address and a system to alert people without an email address that they risk losing access to their account.
FrontierNav currently does not have a notification system so that's something I'll need to work on. It'll also be useful for people that want to be notified of new updates, posts and replies. This is however not urgent so it's something I'll get around to on an odd day.
Lists & Boards
Getting Boards implemented is going to be a major piece of work. There's a lot of work around it that needs doing first, a lot of which is technical debt from previous features, such as posts and lists. So rather than talking about "Boards", I'll be breaking it down into separate features.
First I'll improve posts so that they're more flexible and can be used in a variety of places (lists, notes, text guides, etc.).
Merge Requests
I spent most of my FrontierNav time in the last month adding Xenoblade data which I could've spent developing FrontierNav. That did pay off: FrontierNav has more active users than ever and I added features like data imports to streamline that process. But, as I mention often, it would be nice if I wasn't the bottleneck in processing and getting data in.
The Merge Request process is still in a bit of a limited state. Some people have recently considered contributing, but there are a lot of caveats that I have to explain which causes friction. There are features left that would help greatly in streamlining collaboration so I'm considering working on that.
Next Up
Between improving Posts (which progresses Boards) and Merge Requests, I think it's time I finished off streamlining Merge Requests so that I can confidently encourage others to contribute.
Thanks for reading.