Joint Fleet Command Monthly Report – October 2018

Written Bydulac
Published On

Hello dear reader, welcome to the Joint Fleet Command Report for October!

Oh dear god, it’s November … ahem. In this edition!

  • du Lac talks about IFS2
  • Fleet Council Updates!
  • Golden Pumpkins!

IFS2 Updates

Well … this one’s a bit interesting. I’ll split it into the non-techie bit and the techie bits.

The site should be faster. Basically in September the site exploded. We’re still not 100% sure what caused it other than being hit hard by bots trying to search IFS1 addresses. It kept going on the front-end thanks to the thing that makes it that Lalor can view the site before the kettles boiled, but the backend was awful. Since then I’ve been on a rampage to clean up some of the messy stuff that we did in the early days of last year and try to improve the sites loading times. I’ve just about halved it.

Now the techie stuff …

I’ve offloaded the core WordPress files to JSDlvr, images to Optimole and changed the Cloudflare configurations to cache more aggressively. I’ve also replaced some of the sliding elements (which used lots of AJAX calls for not a lot of result) with a static post grid built round CSS flexbox layouts which is a lot better for mobile.  Plus it looks better on PC too.

We’re still looking at ways to further improve the site response time, and also the site readability issues on mobile. The two remaining culprits are the theme (aka the thing which makes it look like it does) and the forums. We’re testing a lot of new functionality at the moment, including a page builder, new forum system, a new database system which doesn’t admin as terribly, and some better ways to display the content on the site. We’ve also deployed Gutenberg for the page/post content and are looking at how we can embed that or Elementor into the TF & Departmental pages for the Fleet Council to use instead of having to figure out their HTML code. So …

A while ago I plugged for a Fleet Services Director. We’re still looking for one, so if you can do WordPress, please contact me.

Fleet Council Updates

So far this past month we’ve discussed:

  •  Changing Units of Merits to a new and improved system that also deals with the Platinum Awards stuff
  • Separating the IC/OOC stuff as discussed at Obsidian Day
  • Taken over operational responsibility of Obsidian Command
  • Worked out a timeywimey way to introduce the Odyssey Class and phase out the Elysium Class
  • Swapped our Title/Banner font from Bank Gothic to Orbitron across the board
  • Finalised content for Command Academy (Coming Soon!), and started reviewing the content for Cadet Academy

Quite busy.

Golden Pumpkin!

Tonight’s the last night for Golden Pumpkin submissions! Get them in!

Also, Gutenberg lets us do some cool embeds, so here’s a Ted Talk that flashed up on my feed recently. Enjoy!