I got tired of looking at my friends’ student association’s outdated website, and apparently I complained about it long enough that the Biopsi folks eventually asked me to build a new one. What was supposed to be a “quick and easy one-evening project” turned out to be more like a ten-evening project. Hopefully, you’ll find the new website useful! Officially, this is Luuppi ry’s 25th anniversary gift!
What's New
New Design
The website and its code are open source. This means the website is largely built on top of Luuppi ry's web project. Here's an excerpt from Luuppi's website:
"It probably goes without saying that rebuilding the entire website meant giving it a bit of a facelift. One of the main priorities of the new website has been improving mobile support, since using the old website on a phone was pretty awful, to say the least. This is especially noticeable in the event calendar, which has a completely different mobile layout compared to the desktop version. In terms of design, the new website aims to be relatively simple so that users can easily find the information they need."
Open Source
The previous website was largely based on WordPress (which was honestly pretty terrible). The code wasn't really accessible anywhere, and updating content was difficult. Development is now open source, and responsibility for maintaining the website still lies with the webmaster, but anyone can now suggest new features.
Content Management System
As I mentioned, updating the old WordPress website was challenging, to say the least. Updating the new website is now easy and convenient. Behind the new website is Strapi, an open-source content management system that allows almost all of the website's content to be updated quickly and easily. Strapi also supports multiple languages reasonably well, which makes maintaining the English content significantly less painful!
A New Approach to User Management
User management on the new website is handled through Microsoft's Entra ID. However, this change does not mean you need a Microsoft account, as all users have local accounts. In other words, you can still use your own email address to create an account. With the new website, anyone can also register, meaning you no longer have to be a member of Biopsi to create an account.
Centralized and Secure Membership Registry
I'm not even going to get started on how illegal and unsafe it was to store members' information in Excel...
Users can now be assigned membership roles, allowing event ticket purchases to be restricted to members only. On top of that, the membership registry is strongly protected, making it much more difficult for information to be lost or accessed by unauthorized people.
Passwords are also securely stored and encrypted through Entra ID, so not even the webmaster can help you recover a lost password.
A Quick Look Under the Hood
You can read a more detailed explanation here on Luuppi's website.
What's Next?
Current member can start to create new accounts and aim to hold our first event ticket sale through it later this november. All feedback is welcome!
Questions About the Website?
If you have any questions about the new website, feel free to message me directly on Telegram at @juliuszkotelba, or email the entire web team at [email protected].
If you have a feature request or encounter a bug, you can also open an issue directly in the GitHub repository.
And yes, I did copy-paste this news post and tweak it a little :D
