JWSE 2.0 - Planning for the second year with Invision Community

It's almost a year now since I made the shift from Wordpress to Invision Community. It's almost time for a new version of Invision Community, which means that this is a good time to get started on the next iteration of JWSE.

This past year has been a lot of ups and downs. I quit my work to go work for a new company, Corona hit the world and last year I got close to getting burned out from stress. It is safe to say that it was a bit messy.

Going forward towards my 46th birthday in a few weeks and the second year of using Invision Community here on the site I feel confident that the next 12 months will be better.  So I do plan to make the upgrade to Invision Community 4.5 and also to make some adjustments here.

I am going over all features and the databases I currently have. There are a bit to many of them right now and I need to figure out how to best use them. I have already decided to cut away some databases and I am going over the features/applications now to see what to keep and what to remove.

While I expect the upgrade to be fairly straight forward, even if I have made some template changes that need to be recreated. The big change will probably be creating new templates for the Pages application. Right now things are a bit messy in there, but I will clean that up a bit and make sure there are clearly defined templates for the databases I decide to keep.

It's not really something that will block JWSE 2.0, it's just a task that needs to be done...sometime.

The template system for Pages is pretty straight forward and I just need to define how to use them properly here on the site. it all depend on what databases I want to keep and how I want them to look. With 3 basic templates where you have one for the listing, one for the category view and one for the actual content you have a pretty solid base to work from. Since you can mix and match these for any database I can build a nice matrix of styles that should fit most scenarios.

I am currently using a paid addon for the Pages look and feel, even if I have hacked it up a bit. I want to get away from that and clean up the dependencies of 3rd party applications when possible. This is also why I want to build the new templates for JWSE 2.0.

Writing is why I started this project all those years ago and I will of course continue writing. I do see quite a lot of people registering for downloading icons and things like that, which mean that I will add more of that in the next 12 months as well.  While this is still something of an ego site where I enjoy having a bit of fun, I think it's good to consider the benefit for the members, but also for guests. I have some thoughts about that going forward.

I have had my first guest post and I get some mils here and there about partnerships already. I have a feeling this will pickup, but I need to get some information published on how people can contribute.

Starting at the end of this month I will be at the breakpoint where I can start to measure things in Google Analytics. It will be a bit fun to have in some way correct data to measure against. I have not done anything to actually improve traffic this year and still I beat the previous 12 months by a mile.

We'll see what the next 12 months will generate, but I feel it should be a good year to come.

While JWSE 2.0 will be a fun time to build once again, there is things to do here on the site as well. I see some great strategies happening on youtube where short information snippets are published regularely so I will probably get back to that as well. It is better to make something happeing often than wait for something great to happen sometimes after all.

So, I guess I better start working!