[Thank You, Testers] Massive Update... and more to come

Dec 23 Update

This update is now live at https://5emagic.shop as v0.16.0. Read more about the release here. For now, the dev site has been taken offline, and thank you all for your help getting this up and running.

Enjoy the new, hopefully stable features on the live site!

Original Post

Hey, everyone. Long time no talk. Far too long.

First of all, thank you all for your continuing support and patience through this season. I can't describe how amazing it's been to have patrons like you.

For some of my veteran Keepers, you know I've been hoping to make a huge overhaul for a long time. I want to you all to know that's still very much in the works. And you'll hear more about that in the coming days and weeks. We're not there yet, but DAAAANNNGGG we're closer.

I've spent a huge amount of time doing what we nerds call "paying off technical debt" which is a fancy way of saying "doing today what I put off yesterday". Some of this has involved unexciting stuff like updating systems and frameworks. A lot has been laying groundwork for some long-term daydreams.

Included in part of this is a complete overhaul of the integration with Patreon. This should be largely invisible to you guys, but it's critical for some of our shiny longer-term ideas. Even as I type this, I keep pausing to instinctively do my best Mr. Burns impression.

In addition, there are a lot of simple UI fixes and cleanup, including everything from rearranging the menu a bit to leave more room to grow to fixing that annoying bug where you had to click on a drop-down twice to select something. God that was annoying.

Testers Needed

Anyway, this update is not yet live on the 5eMagic.shop website. There's just too much that has changed for me to feel safe without at least a little testing beyond myself. For any curious developers out there...

So, this is where I need some help. I've got these changes sitting up on a dev site, which should have the latest data from the live site:

https://dev.5emagic.shop 

So, if you're willing to take a few minutes to log in, try out a couple of your go-to features, and see if everything works right... it'd be greatly appreciated.

If you do run into any issues, you can either message them to me here on Patreon, email them to me at stinklikeonion@5emagic.shop, or just post them as comments here.

Already Waiting for a Fix?

There are about a half dozen of you who have reported a bug that hasn't been fixed on the live site. Some of those may be addressed on the dev site. The rest, though, will be fixed before this goes live. Don't worry; I haven't forgotten about you.

I'm hoping to get through this testing and the remaining fixes very soon; so you won't have to wait much longer.

Waiting for a Feature?

If you've requested a feature... well, that's probably not included here. But I'm aiming to begin a new season of active development on the site now that my kids are back in in-person school, and we're able to pretend things are normal-ish. So maybe you won't have to wait forever either... depending on the request.

More to Come...

To that end, a lot more is coming. I took some PTO from the day job to do this heavy lifting, and there's more left to do. But the work done so far should keep my past code from getting in the way of some of my bigger plans.

That said, while there's more to come from me, in terms of releases, there is also more to come in terms of help from you guys. A number of you have reached out to offer assistance, and I'm forever grateful. I'll be reaching out to you soon (hopefully tomorrow, but it might be later this week).

For the rest, if you're interested in help... Some of what's coming with 5eMagic will require a lot of community (subtle hint) assistance that's not so much technical in nature. So, please keep an eye out for updates on how you can participate.

Also, we're exploring creative ways to make 5eMagic meet off-site needs, too. To that end, you'll also see some polls coming shortly to gauge your interest in some of the opportunities we're exploring.

In the meantime, have fun breaking the dev site, and thanks again for all the help and support. You guys are the best!