GDU Tech Stack

Ok, this is definitely not the tech stack, which is straight forward in a site like this. But I thought I would write a post on how we managed to rebuild GDU. The old GDU website was all custom, hand-written back-end and front-end code from 2012 – 2019. It quickly became a maintenance nightmare, and just so hard to implement new features. On top of all of that, the forums could not be upgraded because only the old version (maybe 2015?) was compatible.

1. Latest forum software. The very first step was upgrading to the latest and greatest, and being completely standalone as an application.
2. The best CMS on earth. Content is the foundation of all websites, but especially GDU! The CMS has so many features and plugins all about content. Features don’t need to be hand-coded anymore (except for the front-end, which I build from scratch but that’s also ez).
3. The best CMS “theme” on earth. This theme allows me to whip up website pages without needing to write HTML (i.e. a page-builder) but writes the HTML super clean – as if I’d written it myself and in some cases better. For example, I didn’t write a single line of code for this page: https://gdu.one/gdu-is-under-development/
4. The best CMS on earth also comes with a shiny, well maintained and just awesome CSS framework. The same framework previously used in the old GDU game section and refinery.
5. Forum-CMS integration. Ok, this was the only potential project killer. We had to write a Forum-CMS bridge from scratch, and nothing out there came close to our requirements. Here’s how our super integration works:
• there is zero modification to the forums!
• the forum header, scripts, styles and footer are cut off and pasted on the CMS. Works like a treat – all your notifications, PMs etc will pop up everywhere across the whole site!
• When a logged-in forum user access the website, it does a number of things. First, if you don’t have a linked CMS account, it will make one for you. Then (or if you have an existing account), you will be logged in to the website. The website will then use its own user system for user functions, making for a seamless experience.
• For things like avatars, display names, the Forums API is used to get this data straight from the forum. This avoids any issues with things like changing display names after the initial CMS account is created.
6. Posts! Posts (like refinery, games, games media, game blogs, and in the future scripts and tuts) are built on top of the same model of a “post”. I mean, it’s just content rearranged, right? This gives insane flexibility and possibilities on what this site can do. The only tricky part which I’m making my way through is front-end submissions. Once that is done, the sky is the limit!