StoryPress: from Vue to Svelte

Just a little article to announce that the transition of StoryPress from Vue/Nuxt to Svelte/SvelteKit is finished.

The new front end has just been deployed, and after a little refresh of the database*, the site is now back online.

Apart from a few details, the user experience is mostly unchanged. None of the smart contracts were changed in any way. It's just the front end that is now powered by a different JavaScript framework.

In case you notice something unexpected, or a glitch that we haven't seen, please feel free to write a small story about it with screenshots, or simply write a little comment on that article.

Why Svelte / SvelteKit?

Faster. Much more intuitive to work with. We are convinced that SvelteKit will allow us to deliver new features more quickly, and improve StoryPress's User eXperience and User Interface in less time than with our old Vue/Nuxt framework.

*database: hey, you say that StoryPress's content is spread between the Fantom blockchain and IPFS. So why do you need a database?

Well, IPFS can be damn slow sometimes, and you surely don't want to wait 45 seconds to read a new page. Also, even though the articles' addresses are written on Fantom, it does not make it convenient to work on big amounts of data.

So in order to have a faster display, and easily show lists of tags or articles, we copy the data that is on IPFS and Fantom in our local database. But it's actually more a cache system than anything else.

The fun part is that we don't really care about that database and often completely clear it when we want to change how the data is structured inside. Once it's cleared, all we have to do is sync it back with the Fantom blockchain and IPFS data.

The most hilarious bit is that, unlike any of the projects we've worked on so far (yes, we were web2 developers in our previous life), this database has no user table. No need for that kind of web2 relic here.