Changes

• A newly tweaked homepage with a simplified design

• Completely reworked creation cards which now display significantly more information about creations at a glance

• Brand new creation pages styled after minecraft.net articles

• Several updates and improvements to comments

• Newly redesigned profiles that are now significantly more compatible across all device types

• … and several more smaller changes

Homepage

I feel like I’ve changed the homepage almost every update for the last little while, and this one is no exception. The homepage now features a brand new banner, introducing new users to the website as well as giving search engines some more context for what the site is. The featured slideshow as also been reworked to fix a silly bug on Firefox and also to bring it in line with other sideshows on the site. Finally, the buttons to go to specific creation type pages have been moved above the latest slideshow to give users a better jumping off point.

Creation Cards

Now lets take a zoomed in look at the new creation cards. In order to help improve the experience on mobile (and also to make more information readily available to all users) all information has been removed from the hover. Instead, two lines of the short description are shown below the title. Versions and tags have also been moved to the bottom right corner of the image, making them easy to see at a glance.

Creation Pages

Creation pages have received one of the most significant makeovers for this update. They now feature a design reminiscent of articles on minecraft.net with a large horizontal backsplash and tags separating the logo from the content. Several rarely used features have been (at least for now) removed from these pages to help make them less cluttered. The files and leaderboards tabs may be making a comeback in the future, but for now they have been disabled. You may also notice that similar creations are featured under the creation info card helping users find other creations they might enjoy.

Comments

While comments are technically part of creation pages, I couldn’t fit them all in one screenshot so they get their own section. I’m mostly kidding, there have actually been a ton of upgrades to comments to make them much prettier and more usable! Firstly, you can now attach a rating to your comment which allows you to add a little more context behind any reviews you might be leaving. The font size selector in the rich text editor has been removed in favor of providing options for paragraphs and several different headings. Comment replies can now be collapsed (and are by default) so no more wading though a reply chain to see the next comment. Finally, you can now actually sort comments! Only by Newest or Oldest for now but more options coming soon!

Profiles

Creator profiles have received a major refresh, mostly because tech used on the old profiles was no longer compatible with newer versions of React and also because they were a horrible mess to manage. Profiles are now a ton simpler now featuring a simple side-card with information about you as well as some social links and a main page with a list of all of your creations. You might notice that there’s also an Edit CSS button which allows you to customize the visuals of your profile however you like. Just don’t sear off users eyes ok?

Smaller Changes

The Dashboard has received a slight refresh, and should work better on mobile devices now.

MCCreations is now fully translated in several new languages.

The Create flow has been reworked a touch with new, more compact, and easier to understand inputs

Forms across the site now also have much better validation checking and should actually let you know when something isn’t right.

A brand new in-site language editor to improve the experience of those not wanting to use Github.

A much simplified edit form, with all fields back on one page!

An updated Minecraft Version input that now recommends real Minecraft versions.

And so much more. I can’t wait for you to discover all the little changes made to the site (definitely not because I’m too lazy to list them all out here :p). As always, thank you so much for your support and patience over the last many months as I try to get this update over the line.

Thanks again!

Ben Meier/CrazyCowMM

Visual Improvements

Although this update was primarily focused on code cleanup and improvement, many visual changes have also been made to the site. These changes should make the site more visually consistent, usable and understandable.

• More consistency with fonts and colors across pages

• Made more important stats visible on content cards without having to hover, like version and tags

  

• Added a new list view to control how you see creations

  

• Changed the look of the language switcher to make it more clear that you’re switching languages

  

• Significantly improved the look of the dashboard

  

• Removed the feed from the homepage

• Reworked navigation (might feel odd now, but trust me there’s a reason for it)

• Improve the look of tags on the search page

• Tags are now displayed on content pages and can be clicked to quickly find more similar content

Better Creation Experience

Another core part of this update is the improved creation flow, which aims to provide a more guided experience for uploading your creations to MCCreations.

• Improved the create flow, now walking users through every step of the process and hopefully making it more obvious what is required

  

• Significantly improved importing content, which now sends back progress messages to make it more clear what it’s doing

• Improved the file uploading experience with things like upload percentage

Under the Hood

As I mentioned above, the bulk of this update was work done under the hood. More specifically, reworking the entire API to use new and improved technologies while also improving organization and structure. This new API will allow us to build even more awesome tools using the tech we’ve created for MCCreations.

• Rewrote the entire backend API

  • Better management of authorization and tokens

  • Much easier system for adding new types of content

  • Much more consistent, and now documented!

• Improved the use of hooks in the frontend

The Friends We Made Along the Way

This year, MCCreations Next went truly live for the first time in late March when I added submission, and what a project that was! Trying to design a functional, easy to use submission form with all the information the site needs to serve your creations is a tough challenge. I’m still not particularly happy about how it works right now and a lot of improvements have been made since then!

Just a month later in April I integrated Meilisearch for a significantly improved searching experience. No longer do you have to type the exact title to find what you’re looking for, hoorah. With this update I also launched the tagging system for maps, which helps creators really define what their creation is without being bound by the whole “category” thing on other sites.

In June I finally managed to bring over the rest of the content from the old Wix site when I integrated Datapacks and Resourcepacks. I am super regretting how I did that right now but maybe that’s a story for another time. Anyway, with that update it was time to say goodbye to the old Wix site. Is what I would say if I hadn’t kept the site running for basically another 3 months for who knows why. I blame it on the stress of graduating college and starting a full time job.

Although, even to my own surprise, that didn’t slow down updates at all, because in July I pushed out probably the single biggest update this year, translations. Converting every single line of text across every page to be translatable was a huge undertaking, but the excitement of being able to recognize the global-ness of the Minecraft Community pushed me through in record time! The fact that people have taken the time to translate the site into their own language is still one of the coolest things ever. Thank you all so much!

In August I finally actually decommissioned the old Wix site and launched a huge giveaway to go along with it. This was the first ever Minecraft Event I’ve run and it was so much fun (and also very stressful). I’m looking to do a more of these in the future, but I need to take a little break from all the extroverted advertising haha. You’ve already heard me harp on about how well the giveaway went so I won’t talk your ears off again besides to say thank you so much!

In the midst of the giveaway in September I launched leaderboards, I super neat effort to get MCCreations into providing some tooling for map creators. Admittedly, leaderboards have completely flopped and I had to scale back a lot of their functionality in the past couple of months but its also helped me learn how to properly scope dev time versus actual usefulness of a feature. Maybe.

Spooky season didn’t stop me from making cool stuff because in October I launched the new MCCreations profiles and browse pages! The new profiles have been an interesting dive into giving users probably way too much freedom to design their profile how they want. Because of some issues with responsive design though, the new profiles can be a bit tough to work with. I have some ideas for improvements on the backburner so hopefully I can get those out to y’all soon!

Finally, for the last update of the year, I managed to do some pretty neat stuff. Admittedly notifications were a bit of a push to try and get people to use the site more, but they were also a super cool exploration into tech that I had never used before. They also led me to explore how other “friends” related features like direct messages work so maybe you’ll see that on the site at some point ;)

Stunningly Statistic!

Whew, that was a fast overview of all the awesome stuff that’s happened this year! I’m not done yet though! For a final hurrah lets go over some stuffs for MCCreations this year just for fun!

This year we had

• 10,000 visitors

• 23,000 page views

• 8,856 errors

• 200 deployments

• 455 commits

• 124 maps created

• 31 datapacks created

• 15 resourcepacks created

• 30 comments posted

• 2,000 downloads

Man, those are some truly huge numbers. I’m serious, it may be a small fraction of the traffic that other sites get but this is a huge sign for our continued success into the next year and a look at the wonderful support the Minecraft Community can give.

Signing Off

I know this year has been tough for Minecraft Creators throughout the world. With the slow degradation of our most popular source of traffic it can sometimes seem hopeless. Like no one will ever find and enjoy your creations. It’s during times like these that we need to remember the true scale of the impact we have on people. Even just 10 downloads is an absolutely huge number. I mean like do you even know 10 people!?

All joking aside though, the the continued love and creativity of the Minecraft Community is what keeps me going, so get out there and keep making awesome stuff. Oh and also happy holidays I guess.

In previous updates made to MCCreations mostly everything was been about the creations. How can I make it easier for people to post the cool stuff they make to the website. At this point, I feel like creations are in a pretty good place and it’s time to shift focus to community. Posting your creations is fun and all, but it’s not very helpful if there’s no one there to see them. Not only that, but engaging with the community is a huge motivator for continuing to make awesome things, and so far MCCreations has not really provided the tools to let you do that. In these following updates, hopefully that changes.

Enough of the preamble though, lets get to the changes.

Notifications

Accounts can now receive notifications for various events on the site. For now this system is pretty limited, but as our community features grow so will the notifications!

• Notifications for new comments, replies, following posts, ratings and translations

• Settings to allow you to easily control when and where you get your notifications

• A new dashboard page to allow you to see all of your notifications

Follows

Finally, you can get updates from your favorite creators!

• The ability to follow creators

  • You can follow on creators profile pages

  • You can follow using the plus icons next to creator profile icons on creation pages

  • You can follow using the plus icon next to creator profile icons on comments

• A new homepage feed that shows recent posts from your follows

  

• A new page that shows all posts from your follows

  

• Receive notifications when creators you follow post new creations or wall posts

Translations

• Moved translations server-side, allowing backend error messages and emails to be translated in the future

• Translations are now automatically saved after hitting the save button in the translations form. No more having to wait for me to manually add them!

• Fix language editor not filling in inputs with English by default

• Finally fix the Content.short_description warning not being translated correctly

• Re-added the add language button to the language switcher dropdown. Oops!

Performance

This update also includes an entire refactor of how the client fetches data, as well as a shifting of as much data fetching onto the server as possible.

• Convert several pages to be Server-Side rendered to increase performance

• Clicking on tags on the content search pages is now significantly more performant

• Move to using SWR for state-management which should improve performance

Design Changes

In order to accommodate the new feed system, as well as to improve general usability and consistency, several changes have been made to the homepage.

• New homepage design, more prominently featuring new and updated maps as well as your following feed

• Convert all existing dropdown menus to a new, more accessible system

• Most uses of the “tabs” on the top of the screen have been converted to a new sidebar design

  • Dashboard has been updated with a new look

    

  • Account settings has been updated with a new look

    

  • The edit page has been updated with a new look

  

• Added rainbow

• Tweaked breakpoints for mobile styles which should fix issues where the site would look like poopoo at certain resolutions

Random Fixes

As usual, we’ve got a couple of other random fixes as well.

• Comments and wall posts can now be deleted

• Fixed a bug where custom profile layouts could be transferred across creator pages

• Update several page skeletons to help prevent layout shifts during loading

• The menu now once again highlights what page you are on

• The mobile menu now correctly closes when you navigate between pages

• Improved bad word detection so not every new comment is flagged

Subscribe now

Profiles

• Profiles now support Widgets, a powerful customization system that allows you to add what you want to your profile where want. At launch there are the following widgets:

  • Text - Add text to your profile

  • Image - Add an image to your profile

  • Showcase - Showcase your maps, datapacks, resourcepacks or all of them

  • Featured Creation - Feature a creation on your profile

  • Wall - A place for you to leave messages on your profile and others to respond

  • Support Site - Support the site by placing an ad widget on the page

  • Youtube - Showcase your latest youtube video

  • Twitch - Showcase your Twitch channel

  • Discord - Showcase a Discord server

• You can add as many of each widget as you want (although don’t get too crazy :p)

• Widgets can be dragged and resized freely (yes you can make your profile ugly)

• To support widgets, the your profile card and banner have moved to the top of the page

Browse Pages

Browse pages also have a new, more compact look

• On Desktop, filters have moved to a sidebar on the left side

• All Tags are automatically exposed now

• Selecting a sort option will automatically update the list

• The search button has been merged into the same row as the search bar

• Bulk Download button has been removed from mobile to save space

• The default status is now Published instead of Verified. This means your creation is now visible on browse pages by default before it has been reviewed.

• Searching and filtering has been much improved, now no longer preferring recency over all else

Translations

Since there was already a separate announcement for the translation changes I won’t go too in depth into them here. Long story short, we migrated to a new translation system that is much better.

Rich Text

It’s a little weird to right a whole blurb about this, but several new features have been added to the rich text editor

• Options for customizing Font Size

• Options for coloring text

• Options for changing the background of text

• Ability to add spoilers

• Changed the strikethrough icon to an actual strikethrough icon

Everything Else

There have been a ton of changes since September 4th, some of which have been live for over a month at this point. Now it’s their time to shine!

• Several loading skeletons across the site have been fixed, which should prevent some content from jumping around while loading

• Migrated Auth from sessionStorage to localStorage. Now you won’t have to sign in again if you close the tab!

• Mobile improvements

• Significantly improved error checking when submitting your creations for verification

• New static content list pages that I don’t know what to do with

Bugs

• Fixed new playlists added to the homepage being unscrollable

• Improve the way the Rich Text input saves changes, fixing several bugs

• Fix comments not working

• Fix leaderboards displaying when they should not

• Fix the edit form not saving correctly in several instances

• Fix various errors that could occur when non-verified creations appeared in browse pages

• Fix Publish button sometimes not saving that you had published your creation

• Fix approval requests for datapacks and resourcepacks not messaging admins

• Fix pagination on the datapack and resourcepack browse pages

• Fix downloads not being counted for datapacks and resourcepacks

Leaderboards

Our headline topic for this update, maps now support leaderboards! The whole system is extremely easy to add to your project and also very easy to extend should you choose to do so. You can learn mode about leaderboard here, but let’s go over some of their cooler points now.

• All maps now have leaderboard pages

  

• Leaderboard pages can also be created for maps not even on MCCreations, allowing you to take advantage of them even without using the site

• Here’s a leaderboard with scores so you know what it looks like

Translations

I’m continuing to work on make MCCreations the best place to share your minecraft creations throughout the world. To that end, several updates have been made to the way translations can be added and edited

• Translations can now be created and edited at https://mccreations.net/translate

• MCCreations admins are directly pinged for new translations, which should improve update times

• Tweaked the design and layout of the Translations tab in the edit form to hopefully make it more obvious which fields belong to which language

• MCCreations is now translated into Simplified Chinese and Russian. Thank you Nageih/Cat and Artem!

Versions

Oh the version manager, the bane of my existence. I’ve made several improvements and tweaks to the way the version manager works, hopefully the thing is a little less confusing and a whole lot smoother now

• Clicking on a version to edit it now opens a page just for that version

  

• The old “Resourcepack URL” and “Datapack URL” system has been replaced with an extra files system.

  

  • Extra files can be of any content type

  • Extra files can be marked as required, which will cause them to be downloaded alongside the main creation file.

• The version manager now technically supports bedrock. Bedrock files are generally automatically detected, but there is now also a toggle if you are uploading a Bedrock creation. Support for Bedrock still needs a lot of work in other places on the site, but this is an important step towards bringing every Minecraft creator together.

• All creations now also feature a files tab, where you can get a closer look at all the files in a creation.

Tweaks and Fixes

This is the real bulk of the update, so get ready!

• Sitemaps now correctly support localization

• Signup page has been fixed

• Old logo/banner has been removed from page metadata

• Fix various bugs causing profile images and banners to not upload correctly

• Fix crash the could occur if an update failed to push on the edit page

• Reword tag error message to make it clear only a genre tag is required

• Fix video URLs with query parameters breaking the embed on creation pages

• Fix tags combining across categories wrongly, which caused strange issues with the tag selectors

• Fix the creator selector overriding additional creators if you were logged in

• Fix the media gallery appearing inside the edit page tabs when there were no images present

• Fix the media gallery being un-scrollable

• Fix the error when a creation is missing a description pointing to the wrong translation

• Fix content card quick actions appearing on top of dropdown menus

• Filters are now always expanded on the search pages

• Added an error to the Bulk Download button when no creations are selected

• Fix the rich text editor sometimes being uneditable on the edit page

• Fix slugs not being url encoded before being added to creations

• Fix the menu preview that appears while pages are loading being an outdated menu

• Fix issues with the comment form on the map page stealing focus

• Fix an issue where datapacks and resourcepacks would occasionally try to use map api routes instead

• Fix the 404 page never appearing

• Fix an issue where if a creation had no files, the creation page would crash upon visiting

• Fix the version manager re-saving files every time you navigated to the tab

• Various improvements to page metadata throughout the site

• Comments now send a popup message when the comment has been sent

• Added descriptions to basically on fields on the edit form

• Fix select form inputs always having the first option selected by default

• Fix Server-Side Generation on all creation pages, loading should now be significantly faster

• Add new randomized playlists to the homepage

• Fix the popup not closing when editing your profile information

Giveaway

In celebration of the closing of the Wix site (and an easing on my wallet) we’re launching a huge giveaway (rip my wallet)!

The giveaway is running for the entire month of September, so get your awesome creations ready to win some prizes! You can get more details here: https://www.mccreations.net/en-US/events/wix-is-over

Updates

Now on to the actual updates!

First, I’d like to give a huge thank you to cat over on the Discord for providing MCCreations first ever translation! You can now peruse maps in Simplified Chinese to your hearts content! Super awesome.

Wix is Dead

Wait I thought we were done with this Wix thing!

• The new MCCreations site is now accessible from mccreations.net

• Sometime soon(tm) requests to next.mccreations.net will be redirected to the main domain

• Old content URLs (/content/creator/content) will be redirected to the new URLs, although this will only work if the slug has remained the same between the new and the old site. If you’re still using a link to the old site, be sure to check if it still works.

Open Source

• The MCCreations open source repositories have been moved into their own organization instead of living on my personal account

• The MCCreations backend/API, Scaffolding, has been made open source

Comments

This update brings some more improvements to the way comments work, and brings backend changes that will allow for more features in the future.

• Comments actually work (yea that’s kind of important)

• Comments will now collapse if they are over 100px tall

• You can now get a permalink to a comment by clicking the link icon on the right

• Comments are now fetched seperatly from map data, so they should update faster

• Added a new Admin dashboard for Comments, which should make approving them much quicker

• Comments now technically support sorting and searching, although this has not been implemented in the frontend yet

Files n’ Storage

• Newly uploaded files and images are now use OVH Cloud S3 storage rather than Amazon (one step closer to freedom!)

• Profile images and banners now get uploaded correctly

• I’ve changed the design of the Version Manager again! It should now be much easier to manage many versions of content

Ads

You may have noticed those silly little “Ad” boxes on the homepage that never loaded anything (you do have adblock off riiiiight). Well, they’re gone now. They never actually worked, and I decided I’d rather not give away the data necessary to actually run ads on the site. They’ve been replaced with a small banner at the top of every page requesting donations.

Importing

Some various issues with importing have been fixed, including:

• Importing from PMC now works again (shakes fist at Cloudflare). It will be slower though, as it now requires launching a browser instance on my server.

• Importing without an account now works (sorry y’all!)

• Fix various issues where importing was not always brought up to date when creation was changed

Small Things

Some other random small things were changed as well, wouldn’t want to forget those!

• Squashed that weird gap beteween the “Create” and “Sign In” buttons if you were logged out

• Fixed tags being wonky (hopefully, I hate tags)

• Downloads using the Download quick action now actually count towards the donwload counter

• Added Sentry, which allows me to see when and were errors happen on the live site (rip my inbox)

Subscribe now

Translations

MCCreations now supports languages other than English!

• All site text is now translatable

• Users can now change their site language

  

• Users can create and submit translations for a content’s title, short description and description

  

• Creators can add translations for their content’s title, short description and description on the edit page

• Creators can approve community submitted translations on the edit page

  

• Added a system for and wrote a guide on how to add new languages to MCCreations

Other Updates

This update also includes a ton of smaller tweaks and features

Quick Actions

Content cards now have quick actions, which allow you to quickly download the latest version without having to go to the content page. Quick Actions also let you select multiple pieces of content for bulk download on some specific pages.

Better Forms

• You can now actually delete creators from the creator selector

• The media gallery on the content edit pages has been redesigned and how supports drag and drop to reorder the images

  

• Rich Text now supports adding images

• The version manager has been slightly reorganized to make it less busy

  

• Fixed Rich Text not saving updates correctly

Improved Accounts

• You can now change your username in account settings

  

• Creator profiles now correctly only show content they own

• Fixed the sign up page on mobile

• Error messages when trying to update your icon or banner are now the same improved errors you would have gotten with the media gallery

Better Content Pages

• Downloads for resourcepacks and datapacks on the sidebar now count to a piece of content’s download count

• Content descriptions now support adding images

• Comments now support rich text and adding images

Other Improvements

• There are now more warnings and error messages that appear before creators submit their map for approval, making criteria for being approved more obvious

• Styles have been tweaked for almost every page on mobile, which should lead to a much better experience

• The Updated Content row on the homepage is now filtered to not show content on the first page of the New Content row

• Importing from Modrinth is now supported for resourcepacks and datapacks (thanks Modrinth for providing an API that made this really easy!)

• The popup window for creating new content and other things now correctly sits on top of all page content and scrolls with it

• The popup window for creating new content and other things now has a little pop in animation

• The little popup message now has a progress bar

• Content cards now show what type of content they are

It has been done, the final major step towards feature parity is complete! That means that over the next coming weeks, the next site will be transitioned onto the main domain and the Wix version will be closed. If there are any features from the Wix site that you feel are still missing, don’t hesitate to shoot me a message (or leave a comment here) and I’ll make adding them my priority! Anyway, on to the patch notes!

The Big Things

Data packs and Resource packs are now available to be viewed and submitted on the next site! No more getting redirected back to the pesky old site.

• Added ‘Data Pack’ and ‘Resource Pack’ as options to the submission dialogue

• Data packs and Resource packs have their own browse pages, which the menu now links to

  

• Anywhere there was previously ‘Datapack’ or ‘Resourcepack’ has been transitioned to ‘Data Pack’ or ‘Resource Pack’ (SEO baby)

• The New Content playlist, Updated Content playlist and Featured playlist now support showing multiple different content types (icons on the cards coming soon)

The Little Things

• Added new Download sort options (highest and lowest)

• Change the annoying blog thing on the homepage to a button in the footer

• More metadata on content pages (SEO babyyyyy)

• Changed some icons around

• Added a server affiliate button to content pages (gotta make dat bank)

• Replaced Cypress with Jest for testing

Search

Search has been updated to now use Meilisearch instead of just regular text search. That means you can search for just about anything to do with a piece of content and it’ll show up, plus it’s lightning fast!

• Version Filtering has been removed, this is part of search now

• The placeholder text in the search bar now makes it clear you can search for more than a content’s title

• Maps now have tags, which encompass things like genre, subgenre, difficulty and more

  

Other Things

This update also includes a lot of random other fixes, which aren’t enough to have their own heading so lets goooo

• Moved the “New Version” button while editing map versions to the top of the page

• While editing map versions, all versions except the latest are collapsed by default

• Added a new Logging API which will help me catch and resolve bugs faster

• Files in the sidebar on map pages are now limited to 3

• Comments are now scanned for bad words and held for moderation

Bugs

I’ve also squashed a couple bugs with this release

• The Create form now actually works

• The Select form type should no longer show options as selected that are not and vice versa

• Fix a CSS issue when a creator card was not attached to an account

• Fixed search not correctly pushing attributes to the URL and not correctly reading them

• The Menu is now present on error pages

• Fixed a bug where users were not able to upload files

• Worlds downloaded from the File Sidebar now also count as downloads

And that’s basically all folks! This may seem a little smaller than pervious updates, and I’ll admit it is, but I want each version to focus on one specific thing rather than trying to overhaul a bunch of systems at once. It just so happens that the search was not too bad to redo! And also I want to get this out ASAP because the current search is dog dooodoo.

In other news, I’ve made a tentative ‘roadmap’ for upcoming features available on the MCCreations Next Github so feel free to leave feedback on that and yea that’s all from me!

Let’s get right into those changes!

Submission

The big headliner for this update, submission should be almost as featured as the old site although lacking a couple of features

• The Create button on the menu now opens a modal form

• You only have to enter minimal information for your map to be saved as a draft and accessible whenever!

• If you’re submitting without an account, you will be able to edit your newly submitted map for 24 hours

  

• Your map will stay in draft until you request approval with the button at the top of the page

• Warnings about your map are always displayed on the edit page, rather than just when you try and save

• You can add as many creators as you like

  • Creators are a little barebones right now, but this should change soon!

  

• You can add up to 10 images to your content

  

• You can add as many versions of your content as you want!

  • I have a lot more plans for versions as well!

Importing

Instead of submitting a brand new map, you may also import it from other sites!

• This is somewhat of a bonus feature and was not the main focus of this update

• The description, download link, creators and version should all be brought over

• Images will be synced as well, but they can difficult to work with so have a tendency to not work

  

• I will be carefully monitoring imported maps to make sure they are only imported by the actual author

Other Changes

• Added a new dashboard page for viewing all of your content at once

  

• Added Tabs to map pages (a bit of a teaser 😉)

• If you’re logged in and the owner of the content, warnings and an edit button will appear on content pages

  

• The Creator card on map pages now correctly links to profiles on MCCreations

• Image and file uploading has been greatly improved

• Downloads on map pages are now actually tracked

• Rating now works again (don’t tell anyone I completely forgot to add the route when I re-did the backend)

• The old MCCreations homepage now redirects to the new site automatically

Changes for Nerds

Just some stuff for those of you interested in the API or code improvements

• Map stats can now be fetched separately from the API

• Map comments can now be fetched separately from the API

• Fixed all previous queries being erased when using text search

• More information is now returned from the API when getting multiple maps

• I’m currently planning on completely ripping out and redoing the Form component to improve workability, so even though it was introduced in this update avoid it for now

• The rich text editor I’m using is Lexical which supports waaay more functionality than I have implemented. I’m planning to add more at some point down the line

• Comment loading is much improved, now no longer waiting on the profile image to be fetched from our servers

• There has been a complete restructuring of components and styles on the frontend. Much more about the site should exist in individual components and all of these components now come with CSS Modules instead of all being included in a global stylesheet

Is what I would say if I didn’t want to apologize for the delay on this one first :p. You see, when I first posted that teaser for the sign up page in November accounts were actually almost done! I was using Firebase authentication to handle all of the user information so setting it up was super easy and I didn’t have to deal with the hard part of storing sensitive data, security. Obviously I was still planning on storing some stuff in my database, Firebase doesn’t have support for everything I wanted to do with accounts but I thought that was an ok compromise. And then the stuff with Sunbird happened (if you don’t know, it was an app that was basically just storing raw unencrypted user data in Firebase). Now, technically Firebase did nothing wrong in this situation, it was just where the data happened to be stored, but it made me re-evaluate my decision to just hand off all of your data to some unknown source. Well, not unknown, but Google. After some deliberation and some frustration with other Firebase issues I decided to build my own authentication system. I understand the general distrust for signing up to some random site, I would certainly feel a little uncomfortable even if they were using a well known provider let alone doing everything themselves. In order to help alleviate those fears, here’s exactly what I’m storing in our database about you and where it can be accessed.

• Username

  • Encrypted: No

  • Accessible in the Backend*: Yes

  • Accessible in the Frontend with Access Token**: Yes

  • Accessible in the Frontend w/out Access Token: Yes

• Email

  • Encrypted: No

  • Accessible in the Backend*: Yes

  • Accessible in the Frontend with Access Token**: Yes

  • Accessible in the Frontend w/out Access Token: No

• Password

  • Encrypted: Yes

  • Accessible in the Backend*: Yes

  • Accessible in the Frontend with Access Token**: No

  • Accessible in the Frontend w/out Access Token: No

• Providers (if you signed in with Google for example)

  • Encrypted: No

  • Accessible in the Backend*: Yes

  • Accessible in the Frontend with Access Token**: No

  • Accessible in the Frontend w/out Access Token: No

* Not exposed in any API route, public or not

** An access token is granted when successfully logging in via email and password or provider

Hopefully that helps make things a little less uncomfortable. Generally if you want to be as secure as possible, sign up using a provider like Github or Microsoft rather than through email and password. When you do this, MCCreations does not gain access to your provider account, we just get some information like your email and profile picture from them. If you’re still uncomfortable, don’t worry! Important features like submitting will always be available without an account. Feel free to reach out with any questions or concerns as well. And with that out the way, onto the features!

Accounts

• You can now sign up for an account for MCCreations!

  • These are completely separate from the original site. If you had one there you’ll have to sign up again.

• You can add a banner, icon and about to your account (more coming soon!)

• Accounts have profiles!

  

• When commenting while logged in, your username and icon will be auto-filled!

  

• Oh also comments are fixed :p

Search

• Search has been fixed

• You still need to type the exact query to find what you’re looking for. This will be fixed soon!

I think that’s all the stuff that’s publicly visible. I’ve been making a lot of changes under the hood, most of which still needs to be documented so I apologize for that. The backend has also been significantly updated, although I don’t know if it will do anything for performance. Thank you for sticking with me through this journey! I hope you have a wonderful holiday season and I’ll see you soon!

Navigation

• I’m trying out a new logo. Let me know what you think!

• You can now click on the MCCreations name to go home!

• There’s a new alpha badge to make it obvious the site is not done

• The navigation bar will now follow you around on the site! It’s stiiicky

• The navbar will now compress into a menu on mobile!

  

Slideshows

• Cards are now much bigger on mobile

  

• They’ll also animate a little on page load so you know you can scroll them!

• I’ve expanded the touch target to the full width of the card rather than just the width of the title

Map Pages

• The download, title and video/logo section has been updated to fit on mobile!

  

• The information sidebar has been moved to the bottom of the description

Search and Filters

• Filters are here! The options are pretty limited for now, but more will be coming soon as well as improvements to the existing ones (especially version I know that thing is a pain)

  

Improved Documentation

Since moving to Typescript, I’ve tried to clean up some functions and documentation for the data fetching in the front end. Functions should now all be in the same place, getData.ts and each has it’s parameters and return types documented. All objects returned by the API should now have respective interfaces in types.ts as well. Next steps on this front are to better componentize elements in the application so it’s more obvious what things are built from! Thank you for sticking with me as I work through this mess!

What’s Next?

For the next coming weeks I’ll be working on getting user accounts and creators added to the site. I want to make sure this is done well because, well, now I’m dealing with your actual info so you might not see updates for a bit. I have a pretty good plan for how I’m going to do this, so it might go faster but whoooo knows.

Since we just launched the alpha of the new site and open sourced the frontend code, there’s quite a bit to talk about so lets dive right into it!

Goals

My goal with MCCreations has always been to provide the best place for Minecraft creators and Minecraft enjoyers to come together to share their experiences with the game we all love so much. That isn’t changing, and with the new site I should be able to get even closer to realizing that goal. However, that might sound a little bit contradictory considering I’ve been mostly radio silent this year, and to be entirely honest I don’t think that will change too much for now. My focus is entirely on building out this new site to be as awesome as it can be and that might mean some quiet time as I put my nose to the grindstone to get there. Once the site is at least feature complete with the old one is when I plan on really throwing my full force behind growing the awesome community here!

The Future

As I mentioned, there might be some quiet time here and there as I work to bring the new site all the way to 1.0. However, now that the cat is out of the bag so to speak I plan on being much more communicative about updates, upcoming changes and plans.

For now, my focus is going to be on getting the new site on par with the old one. Adding submissions, accounts, and things like that (this blog is part of that too!). Once those things are done, I have some plans for what new features I’d like to bring but I don’t want to share those until they’re a little more finalized. In the meantime, don’t hesitate to tell me things you’d like to see on MCCreations that you think would make your experience as a creator or player better.

Why Did This Take So Long

If you’re an awesome person, you might remember that I teased something about moving away from Wix and building a custom site all the way back in 2020! Obviously the version I teased way back then is not even close to what I launched last week, in fact they share literally 0% of the same code. The biggest reason for that huge delay was… I didn’t know what I was doing. Big surprise I’m sure. I started this project pretty much before I started college, and now I’m about to graduate. I’ve taken courses on web development, databases and security. I’ve learned new things, tried to remake the site, failed, learned new things again and tried to remake the site again. The ‘custom site’ idea has actually been through about 4-5 complete rewrites, and I mean complete. I switched languages, APIs, database softwares, hosts, pretty much anything you can think of. Every time I learned something new that I thought would be neat for MCCreations, I tried again. Until finally I knew enough to finish it. This current iteration of the site honestly only took about 6 months or so from when I started it and boy what a journey it’s been! I’m so happy with that I’ve managed to create and I hope you are too

Updates

Whew! Now that that’s out the way let’s talk about what’s new with MCCreations this week!

Typescript

The site frontend has been updated to Typescript! This means better error-checking and a much easier programming experience that should allow me to get more done faster. This is also a push to make the code more readable and easily understandable, which is something I will be working on over the coming weeks.

Mobile

Did you try and visit the alpha on your phone? You might have noticed it looked a bit horrible! I’ve been working on improving the site experience on mobile this week, and although it hasn’t been deployed yet I wanted to share some photos!

The featured slideshow has been altered to fit on mobile screens while still providing a good amount of information. Unfortunately the description had to go. You will be missed!

Playlists on the homepage now show 1.25 cards instead of 2.1. That means that the cards are much bigger and text is actually readable! Wahoo!

Cards on the maps page now take up the full width of the page, and their font size has been increased for even more readability. Although you can’t see it, the touch area has also been lengthened to the full width of the card, not just the length of the title

On mobile, the sidebar on the map page has been yote to the bottom of the description! Now you get a good amount of width and the same amount of information!

Well, that’s all for this week! I’ll see you all again soon!

-Ben Meier