Wainuiomata.com

Posts tagged by theme

Reversing temporary mobile fix

Posted on January 23, 2024 by: Rob van der Linde
Filed under: Announcements, Developments
Tags: wainuiomata, website, gallery, theme, zoom, mobile

The other week I added a tiny improvement to the current website theme to make it a little more bearable on mobile. This was to set the default zoom level to 1.0, unfortunately it also has had some side-effects with the gallery which means I will be forced to roll it back soon.

It has made viewing photos in the gallery weird on mobile only, unless you zoom out fully first before clicking on the image. However people won't know that and will likely just see the site as "broken" instead, which is no good.

At first I was thinking "what if we just turn off zoom default of 1.0 for the gallery", the problem with that is it will lead to an inconsistent user experience with some pages looking zoomed in and others not. The other problem with it is that blog pages are also affected by this, not just the gallery.

So the best solution is to roll that bit back I think. Rushing the new design through faster isn't going to happen in these heat levels, it's been hard to function at all.

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Starting frontend rebuild

Posted on December 18, 2023 by: Rob van der Linde
Filed under: Announcements, Developments
Tags: wainuiomata, website, react, design, theme, vite

I went for a brief visit to the Wainuiomata Historical Museum yesterday, it was a short but informative visit. We updated the link to their website as we didn't have the correct one set so we fixed that. I also learned of similar sites and added them to the Links section and sent out a hello.

When adding historical material to the site that isn't our own content we will always source it, and make sure that it is accurate which is important to them. We try to do this anyway, but from our short meeting I got the picture that this was important.

I also started building the frontend so I'm quite excited, first day of development towards the new interface rebuild. I started setting up a NodeJS React build pipeline and fit that into the existing Wagtail site structure with Docker containers.

We are using NodeJS, React, Vite and Typescript. Things can always change rapidly in web development, particularly frontend. But that is the stack at the moment. Hot module reload (HMR) is working beautifully which allows for instant feedback which is awesome. Make a change to a Javascript, Typescript or CSS file and it instantly refreshes but without reloading the page. This brings frontend development to modern times finally, but we have to fit it in with the existing backend rendered pages so this isn't a single page app.

I am still thinking if I should roll some of this out incrementally, like React in the current site first.

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