Welcome Back, For the Last Time!
In this post, we'll be taking a look at why we're choosing to leave Wix and a sneak peek at what's next for our club website.
The Wix Limitations
As we can see through our 100s of blog posts since 2021, Wix served us well initially with its user-friendly interface and plethora of features. However, this year, we started feeling the pinch of its known limitations.
As an App Development Club, we want a website that allows us to directly contribute to its source, customize components to our liking, and most importantly, enable members of our club to use it most effectively.
Wix, while convenient, lacked the extensibility we desired. First, the inability to export content is a bottleneck. To put it simply, Wix is "locking us" into forever sticking with their CMS and services. (ie. If Wix were to shut down tomorrow, we'd lose years of content)
Also, part of our club mission is building apps, which Wix, quite frankly, doesn't align with. Particularly, this is due to its low/no-code nature. And yes, while Wix does support thousands of developers around the world in building their applications, we have more custom use cases, than the regular Wix developer.
Whether it's integrating a dynamic events calendar, showcasing member projects, or even implementing a streamlined contact form, the website possibilities after moving away from Wix are truly endless and what we believe to be better for our community long-term.
What does this mean for me?
Nothing! We'll be developing the site in our GitHub organization, and making it completely open-source so that if you'd like, you too can contribute to our club's landing page, content, and other sections. Currently, that's not possible.
We'll also be keeping our Wix site as an "archive" of the years of the content we've accumulated, although, please note that the main pages will all be pointing to our new site so that we can do an incremental deprecation.
It was great working with Wix all these years, but we're excited about the future ahead!
A Sneak Peek
Now that you know we're leaving Wix, you may be asking, what are we moving to? Well, we're glad to tell you that it's going to be an Astro-based website!
Astro.js is a framework for building content-rich sites like our club website. However, Astro has superpowers, allowing us to craft excellent design systems, components, and overall websites to best serve our needs.
The "Superpower"
The way this can be best visualized is through a look at the islands architecture, which the Astro team describes as a way to build our websites by breaking them down into encapsulated and independent islands of functionality.
Each island can be represented by a single component, a group of components, or even a whole page; it'll be up to us to decide how granular it will be.
This means that if we have only a small subset of interactive page elements, we don't have to wrap the whole website structure in a UI framework. We can only perform partial hydration on that island and leave the static content, as it is, untouched.
This is nice because, in our club, we all have varying levels of experience.
Astro is opt-in by nature. And in using Astro, the more advanced concepts of web development are "choose if you need", meaning:
If we don't feel confident using solutions like React or Vue, we can still build our club website with all the benefits of using the Astro build environment without the overhead of something like Angular. This will allow new members of our club to contribute to our website more easily.
And for our more experienced members, we're free to bring as little or as much complexity as we wish. Astro is flexible, and we're able to extend it with more than 100 various integrations in the islands that may need it.
We're eager to get to work on this website as it will in all likelihood be our longest-running project to date. They say a website is never done, and we couldn't be more excited to work on this throughout the rest of the academic year and beyond!
The new website will be hosted on the domain https://osuapp.club like we've always done, but this time, it will lead to our new site, not the Wix site here. Please note that we will be keeping the Wix site up at its free public domain: https://appdove.wixsite.com/club for archive and historical purposes. No need to worry about the existing site disappearing!
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