Subeta has a lot of moving parts. Something you may have noticed over the years, is that sometimes it can take a lot for a UA or Amber to track down the information to help you resolve an issue that you're facing. That's mostly my fault.

Existing Panel

Our admin panel goes back to the first pages of the site. The user panel is some of the oldest code on the site, and even when we do things like update the wardrobe, the admin tools tend to be the last part of the site updated. That comes from a lot of reasons, but getting things in front of you comes way before figuring out how to manage it on the backend.

What that means is that we've got a ton of pages that do custom things, and make it very very hard to actually manage the site. The fact that mods and admins are able the site running on this panel is honestly a signal to their grit more than the tools being 'good'.

Most of the areas of the admin panel have broken images, or have to be used in a very particular ways (that the team has learned) to not break everything. It's not great, and takes up a lot of everyones time to maintain AND utilize effectively.

[h2]New Panel (Nova)

Now, we're heading into a world where the admin panel is built 'automatically' on our models. A model is something like "Item", and we use that to get information from the database around the new site. (Please excuse the side bar mess above, I'm about to do a deep organization 😭)

All of the information that we set up on these models, can then immediately be turned into an admin panel. The same way that we get a users inventory (User::where('userid', 1)->first()->items()) is used to populate a users inventory in the Nova panel, with just a little bit of work from us. That means if we make a change to the way that the users inventory is pulled, that will happen in the panel by default, instead of the UAs waiting 3 months for that part of the panel to also get updated.

So what?

This is a huge change and benefit to how the site is managed by the team. It means doing things like modifying pages and what items go out is much closer within reach for the content folks like Amber, and won't require nearly as many code changes around the site to make changes to those for all of you.

This is something that most of you will never see, except that the amount of time that it takes for things to change should be reduced by a ton, and UAs will be much happier in general ;)