From 2012 to 2018

I spent the last 3 months building the website design from the ground up to bring piratemc.com into 2018! It’s been a challenge doing it from nothing to what you see today, but well worth the effort.

When I first opened piratemc.com in September 2012, It was only for me and SuperGL to document out little pirate world together, I never thought we would ever expand to the size we are today so I used a free WordPress theme, we have been using this outdated theme up this releae! It was bloated, hard to navigate, loaded slowly and wasn’t mobile friendly.

What’s new

The entire design was created from scratch, so the entire theme is new, but I did try and keep a similar layout and colour scheme for familiarity for existing users.

For those that are interested in what I have built into this wordpress theme I made, here’s short list:

• Mobile first dynamic design
• Loads faster, less bloat
• SVG Logo
• I made custom SVG map icons
  
• Built using Bootstrap 4 CSS Framework to easily update
• Mega Menu designed to easily find what you are looking for
  
• Removed sticky user black bar and created a custom notification Mega menu for logged in users.
  
• Logged in users notification area has links to your forum content and activity page, can also clear all notifications in one click.
• Recorded a shaders video of myself sailing a ship for the homepage
• Re-made the Feature icons on the homepage and removed and re-done some of the feature sections, some icons re-made.
  
• Built a custom plugin to show online users
• Built a custom plugin to show notifications
• Build a custom Pirate page that shows a users username history & loads the punishment tracker, view them by clicking on online users. This will be expanded into the stats page for each user, similar to what I built back in 2015.
  
• Made the blog posts able to be loaded from the homepage to paginate them.
• Using a more nautical font
• Created custom login page, new logins get taken to the site wide activity.
  
• Created new PvP map server page for the PvP server
• Added pop-up “play” button for new players to see a quick video on how to join, this also had a button to copy the server url to the clipboard
• Added an “Ask for support” button in the footer, to quickly go to the support forum
• Made the Forum not have any sidebars to read content easier, this may change later after testing

Source Controlled

The theme is pushed & pulled from git to sync between development & production environments which allows me to quickly update and test locally then push to the production server, this also means as its available as git source other people could also help update/fix bugs/build new additions for the website paging all web developers and designers!

Website Future Plans

Now the theme has been updated, that’s the heavy work out the way, now its time to focus on content & create a new Stats web UI for all servers.

• All page content needs to be updated, a lot of it is very outdated, I need a writer that knows the server inside out, contact me! Im able to quickly set your website account to easily edit pages!
• I have already started on a player statistics page! Lets bring back web stats. Back in Feb 2017 I had to convert my Statistics from V2 to V3 of the stats plugin, the plugin is trash still so I have put off creating a web UI until we have something more stable, Im sick of waiting so I will design the stats web UI to easily be updated when database schema changes in the future.
• We are planning to trial a new PvP plugin for the PvP server that has a lot of features for 1vs1 tournaments etc, all of these are recorded into a database which means I can show these on a front end, I plan to have a PvP Tournaments/Stats page on the wesbite once we are up and running.
• Shops website is dead, has been for a while as the plugin we use to generate the data is broken, I need a Java developer to fix the simple plugin that exports the sign data into JSON to get this back up, if we can get someone to fix the plugin, I will migrate the shop website into the new theme so its fluid.
• The forums need its CSS updated, the forums import their own CSS over the top of mine, which is why the text is small and the wrong font, there’s a few other inconsistencies I don’t like with the forum formatting too.
• I want to explore options to somehow sync in-game logged in players with accounts on the website, this may be too complex for a little payoff, so may not happen.
• I want to re-figure out how I made this crews page https://crews.piratemc.com/ so I can then figure out how to make it live data and also show rivalries, this is very down the priority list mind.

Found a website bug?

Please report it, I have done hardly any testing, so you will see formatting bugs on Desktop/Mobile make sure to report them to get them fixed, Ive already pushed a ton of bug fixes since release from random things I see when I browse, there will be bugs and visual glitches as the website hasn’t been tested! we have a dedicated forum for reporting/requesting website issues/features.

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