#solus-orbis

I know I’ve been quiet, so I wanted to drop in and give everyone an update!

Over the last 7 months, I was heavily focused on working long hours and trying to meet deadlines for my then job. About a month ago, I accepted a new position where I have been working long hours to try and meet deadlines (lol), but that’s mostly on top of also trying to learn a completely new code base and the way my new company functions. This will probably continue to be in play for the next few months as well; therefore, my focus has not been on Solus Orbis as much as I’d prefer.

Needless to say, I have been very mentally drained. I wasn’t taking any R&R on the weekends as I should have been, and I was stressing myself out with my new position so my brain was overtaxed. My anxiety was through the roof, but I finally did no coding this weekend for the first time in months and it was greatly needed.

All that being said, SO Is NOT lost or forgotten. My next few weekends just need a mental break and then hopefully I can jump right back into it.

Drag and drop forum ordering say WHAT!

I’m not purposefully being quiet on the SO realm. I’m just hunkering down and doing my best to keep trucking forward! Today I thought I’d throw in a sneak peek of one of my favorite features in the SO Admin system: multi-select. You can best see its use here, by adding or removing masks to a rank. :)

The first episode of the Solus Orbis Development series is live today! In this series, we’ll be getting some behind the scenes looks at various pieces of Solus Orbis.

For today’s episode, we’ll be peeking at the forum templates.

I hope you guys find this intriguing. I’ll be doing more of these leading up to beta, and plan to do some live streams prior to beta as well as (hopefully) getting the help of you guys for some videos! <3

Don’t mind my sighs! I was incredibly nervous, and trying to speak slowly.

This project is going to take a serious amount of time. That’s totally okay, of course, but I thought it might be worthwhile to document some of the process here! In today’s post, I’m going to talk about ‘the guts’ of Solus Orbis. Essentially, what languages I’m currently using to create it.

Laravel: Before my present job, I had been teaching myself Laravel in order to create a project management for the job I was in at the time. Now, at my present job, one of our client’s site’s has Laravel as part of its infrastructure. I’m familiar with Vue most, but also some of Angular and React; however, since these are compiled, this didn’t quite work for user created skins and templates. I’d want to use PHP for its get/put file contents functions. I wanted to use a framework in order to ease right into a good structure and flow, so I debated between Symfony and Laravel. Ultimately, I decided to go the route of Laravel because of my familiarity with it.

The Data: Before even diving into this project, I knew that I wanted to have a ‘server’ and ‘client’ separation. As a MySQL nerd, that was my database of choice (MongoDB being a close second). MySQL ultimately won for relation purposes. As a JavaScript nerd, I chose ExpressJS for my server. After some further digging into what and how I wanted to do this, I decided to learn GraphQL. The sole purpose of Solus Orbis is to increase my programming skills with the hopes that it can be an asset to the RPG community, so there’s really no rational to some of my choices. (Maybe this will come back to haunt me.) Regardless, I’ve continued down the GraphQL path with an Apollo/Express combination.

My two weaknesses are security and deployment. I know to hash passwords and to watch out for XSS attacks, but there’s so much more out there. I’m also no devops fan. Kubernetes, docker... I’m vaguely familiar, but it’s still a mystery to me. HOW WILL I EVER GO FROM LOCAL TO A GLOBALLY ACCESSIBLE SITE? SEND HELP!

My level of progress is substantial, but there’s still so much to figure out and do. It’s incredibly exciting and challenging, so I’m loving every minute of it. If there are any specific updates that you’d like to see, or any other content, let me know! :)