Creating Community (Part 1)

Somewhere we all belong

To me Minecraft has always been a fun place where we can all belong. It doesn’t matter what we look like or what we believe in, we are all united by our love for this silly little block game. Some of us build amazing structures, others create insane redstone contraptions. Yet more build exciting and innovative games, redesign Minecraft to their liking and host huge hubs for us all (or just a group of friends) to get together. Minecraft is it’s community, and in times like these that’s exactly what we need more of.

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