From the start

The new/beta wardrobe was a huge undertaking. We had to take something that was built in a weird vacuum separately from the site (with the intention of being the coding for the whole site) and make it into something that integrated well. There were a number of goals set at the start that had to be met for it to be considered a successful project.

1. It had to work on the current site. The ‘old’ wardrobe exists in it’s own little universe which you can see if you load it by itself. It has entirely separate coding, and doesn’t interact with the site at all. Whenever we want to do something that could interact with the wardrobe, we have to write a lot of code that can’t be reused elsewhere.
2. It had to use modern technologies so that we don’t have to do this again in a few years. The old wardrobe has no concept of what JSON is, serializes everything in a bizarre way, and has very little actual caching.
3. It has to be faster than the current wardrobe. It has to be able to stay open in a browser for five minutes without using more CPU and ram than other tabs for sites like Facebook.
4. It has to be easy to modify in the future, and add new features to.

So far, we’ve done a pretty good job. We’ve added new features (skins) to the wardrobe while we’ve worked on it, we’ve made it use mostly new technologies, and it operates within the site it’s supposed to be on.

The big problem? Number 3, speed. The beta wardrobe right now is prone to crash if you move between tabs too quickly, and you can watch the CPU slowly tick up the longer you're in the tab. That isn't acceptable, and is something we need to move to resolve.

Some Q&A with imaginary questions I know you'll all ask. Q: How do we fix it? A: With another rewrite, of course.

Fortunately because of and , I don't have to rewrite the whole thing. All of the "back end" coding (the sort of thing that fetches your clothing, items, saves your avatar, finds your outfits, etc) is sound and doesn't need to be rewritten. The front end (the stuff in your browser) is what needs to be changed. I'm moving it to ReactJS which is what Facebook and Instagram use for all of their new front end interactions. It means that someone far more clever than me is writing all of the important parts (refreshing when there is new data, saving things to local storage, placing data on the page correctly, holding states across pages) and I just get to write the Subeta parts of it, instead of reinventing the wheel.

Q: Why can't you finish the wardrobe now, and then start working on this? A: It just doesn't work. If I put the work into finishing the wardrobe as it is now, we'd still have a broken wardrobe and users asking to keep the 'old' one up because it's the only one that works in their browser. It's better to just say "okay, this didn't work" and start working on something that will work. Believe me, I don't like anymore than you do that weeks of hard work are going to need to be redone.

This process has been underway for a few weeks now (mostly with me learning the ropes of react) and I’m really excited so far. Speeds are insane and most importantly I can stay in the browser window for extended periods of time.

I hope to have something to show here in the next few weeks!

thanku!

Thanks for the update! I've long adjusted to the way beta works (and doesn't) but I look forward to the finished feature.

All I can say is, the new wardrobe certainly works very well and it is perfect for all my needs. I appreciate all the work, time and effort that went into making our new wardrobe too. Thank you very much just for updating our wardrobe system, as that is something I use all the time and something I've always enjoyed very much here too. I love the new wardrobe as it's such a huge improvement over the old one!! Tips my hat to you for making it happen!

Admitting that something does not work at all as it was intended takes a lot of courage.

I appreciate knowing what is going on with the project, and while it may seem like the end of the world when my outfits don't save and load as T think they should, I predict that I will survive.

Good luck with the fancy new project.

Well it's great to hear that it's being worked on again.

Tbh I never liked the beta wardrobe because - and this is probably extremely petty of me - it takes up the entire page. It's extremely large. So much so that you had to remove the sidebar. It's downright overwhelming to me.

I love the small and compact old wardrobe.

Thanks for the update! :)

This sounds very encouraging! Very appropriate GIFs, too, hahaha. I don't mind the idea of a rewrite, especially when you've got the bones of the program built already. Of course, I don't "mind" -- but I can understand this would be your last possible option after having already gotten a headache from it all. Good luck -- I do not envy your job!

What I don't like about the Beta Wardrobe is the way you take Items out of it again. The old wardrobe is much easier to use in that case. Just saying this, in case it matters somehow. :P

But thanks for the update.

Thank you so much for the update! It's good to know what's going on, and I can't wait to see the new wardrobe when you're done! :)

So the new new beta wardrobe will be just as large? Unfortunate. I hate that I have to scroll up and down the page to do anything. My friend's screen is shorter than mine so I imagine for her it's probably 500x more annoying.

Thanks for the update. However, why is there no option to look for a particular item by name in the BETA Wardrobe and why can't we have the option to see items that are just there or also select recently added like before - that was very convenient.

I really didn't notice the crashing in the beta wardrobe, I already made some outfits there for a REALLY long time - we're talking about at least 1 hour - and it never crashed. But it's good to know that we'll have a better thing :D

I'm with you on this one. I like the compact style of the old one. I'm sure it'll be easier once we adjust to the Beta, but it probably will be a bother after a while. Has she tried holding CTRL and using her scroll wheel to zoom out on the page? It makes everything smaller and not as easy to view, but I find it occasionally to be useful in that regard.

One small bug presently with the Beta is that it permanently thinks my HA is a dude. Not sure how big a deal that is, but I thought it might need to be mentioned.

Thanks for the update, Keith :D

And it definitely makes more sense to use coding that someone else has already figured out, as that should save you a load of hassle in getting it all set up (I had to wade through 16 sheets of a coding language I had never used before (I was the only person in the department who knew anything about html :P) and that was bad enough, let alone the thought of having to write it from scratch!)

So want the beta wardrobe to show an items name when you hover over it like in the old beloved wardrobe - it helps to have that as well as the visual. Thanks for reading.

good to see the beta wardrobe is getting some attention! i personally switch between the regular and the beta and am used to both, i like both for different reasons. (as others have said, it's unfortunately really frustrating to use the beta wardrobe sometimes because i can't see my avatar while i browse through items in the lower box!)

but is there any possible way to fix the "most recent" sorting in the beta wardrobe? i tend to use this a lot and is one of the main reasons i revert back to the old wardrobe. and also maybe add an option to show 500+ items at a time? ;_; i know adjusting the orientation/size isn't a priority atm, but these seem like they could maybe be easy fixes?

I'm usually very patient and optimistic. So good luck and have fun! :)

Thank you ! I appreciate your in-depth explanation, it really means a lot to me and everyone else. I'd love to see more of these explanations in the future, cause it actually helps me understand the site's coding as well as why some aspects of it are taking longer than anticipated or why it hasn't been finished yet. ^^

Keep up the good work! :D