Rebuilding the site again for Year 3

With the upgrade of the site to 4.6 I noticed some areas where things broke a bit. Nothing major, but it will add up eventually and I do have a planned clean up set anyway, so I will do a bit of reconstruction, or rebuilding. As things have progressed, I have felt that the CSS is getting bloated, so I feel like correcting that while at the same time try some new things.

As part of the rebuild, I will make some adjustments to the structure of things, like making sure that all databases have unique templates and that CSS is loaded only when a certain component or section is called. For example, I plan on adding section specific CSS only when that section is loaded by using template conditions. Same thing with components, where I will include the CSS needed in the component itself rather than using the global one.

I will start listing the different main classes for Invision Community as well so I can use it in different overrides, but also to reuse in certain aspects of the design. For example, I am toying with the idea of having different theme colors based on the section, so I could quickly make a change to these colors by making an override file that only show on certain sections.

I am looking into the possibility to add a dark theme switch to the site as well. Not because I think it will be necessary, but mostly because it is something that looks fun and it can be a good learning experience. When it comes to adding things, I am going to remove some things as well. It will be some plugins that I am not really using at the moment, like the Quiz, the Links and the Books sections.

I will start with the framework of the site, where I will look into the possibility to move the header and footer to their own templates and then build the basics for the global variables. I will of course make these changes to the beta site first, where I will also take advantage of the Designers' mode since it will allow me to work faster.

So, there is some work to be done!