Under construction
When we originally built the site in 2019 or so, we used Stylus for the CSS. It was stubborn. It was silly. We already saw the writing on the wall. But we did it anyway. And we thought – that’ll be funny to force the students to redo it later. But it turned out they were too busy working on their own projects.
For fun, we recently rebuilt the whole PE site from scratch.
We built it as a fresh separate (bare-bones) project. There were a few core things that we wished we’d done differently. For example. the CMS didn’t have a concept of section of sections. We didn’t have a nestable way for our common page modules to have a parent section that could be assigned landmarks/ARIA. Over the years, what started out as a platform for many courses – turned into a web of resources for our main course at the root level. It did it’s job and now after almost 6 years of additions and iterations and evolution – it was time to take those things and put them back into a program-level structure.
So, we built that. There’s probably 50 hours of videos (that we’ll never edit). But it sure was nice to create a fresh version based on everything we’ve learned over years of use. Once we’d explored that – we had to decide: would we move all the data over to the new version? Or could we take the proof of concept and plant that seed in the current site and rework from the middle? Or should we rebuild with Nuxt and Laravel and prepare to white-label the system for other schools?
There was a lot to think about — and all while Derek is trying to decide if he should go full-time on a big design system at a place like Netflix – or go work with Anthropic or somewhere new (now that DFTW is self-paced).
So, here we are.
What we decided to do – is to rework the current site with the new structure.
It’s going really well, and we’re excited!!
But – we branched of / and yes: deleted ALL the CSS. Yep. ALL of it.
We used this opportunity to create a little course on information architecture and another one about design systems. But we basically put ourselves in a position where were the main branch got stranded with some loose ends — and the new branch can’t be reasonably merged until we rewrite the rest of the core CSS system. It doesn’t effect any of our current students – (since the CMS is the source of truth) but there are lots of little spacing issues and things that aren’t A+ that popped up. So, that’s how it’s going! There might be a few embarrassing things (for us!) on the public end of things but it’ll be OK. You can still check out all the resources as always.
We’re really excited to show off the design system and our new per course, per module, and even down to the per page-section CMS controlled themes. We hope that having some variations across the longer courses will keep things fun and it ties into the story of DFTW ;). (It’s also just an excuse to show off our CSS and UI/design systems experience)
So, that’s the story!