August
Chapter overhaul work, admin dashboard additions and other improvements
Last updated
Chapter overhaul work, admin dashboard additions and other improvements
Last updated
Welcome to Autumn and the latest monthly update. August has been relatively quiet on releases, but there is a lot of new, important work brewing, so read on to find out more!
📋ChangelogAs mentioned in the previous update, I was finally able to start working on the chapters overhaul, which will bring two crucial missing pieces to Kenmei:
Ability to set chapters manually, for example when a series doesn't have any supported sites
Ability to view and select from all available chapters of a particular source, instead of pasting Chapter URLs.
One of the most frequent support requests has always been whatever it was possible to set a chapter for the series. While it has been possible to do that, by pasting the URL, many never figured that out, not to mention a slew of other problems with this approach.
So this change has been something I really wanted to add, but it required an expensive upgrade, so I wasn't able to add it until Premium launched and enough people subscribed for me to justify the infrastructure upgrade.
Now that context has been set, what's the progress been like you ask? Well, I have done some good work this month, but it's still quite far from being finished. I am hoping to wrap up this work in September, but it could go either way, due to the complexity of the work - being a substantial overhaul of the current system.
This overhaul will also unlock loads of features and improvements down the road and will be a huge step forward to making Kenmei the best manga tracker out there. That's why I started calling this set of features Chapters V2.
On that note, I'll leave with a sneak peek at how Add Manga modal looks like, with this new functionality (design is not finished):
The other theme of the month has been continuing to put in work for creating an Admin Panel for myself, and eventually for other contributors when Kenmei goes into phase 2 (Providing comprehensive series discovery)
There is still a lot of work to be done, but I've finally added the ability to upload covers and update titles. That's something I spend half of my time doing when it comes to regular data improvements, so it'll be a huge time saver going forward!
While I imagine it's not super interesting to most of you, this is a crucial piece of Kenmei, that will allow us to continue improving data faster and better, for the ultimate goal of making Kenmei the most accurate manga information source.
This will get a bit technical, but it's an exciting project. As some of you know, I have been migrating UI elements to new, custom-built ones for months now (Originally the project was using ElementUI). One of the reasons for doing that was to migrate to a new major version of the framework I use (Vue), which unlocks huge performance gains as well as functionalities, such as:
The size of the app will be up to 41% lighter (meaning faster page loads)
Initial render would be up to 55% faster (meaning faster page loads once again)
View updates when using Kenmei will be up to 133% faster
And finally memory usage will be up to 54% less.
Being on the finishing line, I've decided to make the jump and just start this migration process, together with updating the last couple of UI elements, built with the new major version. It's not an easy process, but I've gotten much further than I expected in August and I am optimistic about finishing sometime in September, or at the latest - in early October.
As a result, this is now my second priority after Chapters Overhaul. Watch this space 👀
As usual, many bugs have been squashed and various smaller improvements made. I wanted to highlight one such improvement, which is the new Onboarding screen, which most of you probably won't see at this point.
But for new members, that just join Kenmei, they will now have an easy to understand list of actions, that should help them jump right to the most important things one can do on Kenmei right now.
The focus remains the same as last month, but some items have expanded in scope, which is shown in cross-outs below. I will be mostly focused on chapters and front-end architecture overhaul in September. I doubt I'll finish both, but chapter overhaul is the #1 priority and should be completed then.
Admin control panel
QoL improvements across the board (new sorting, filters, etc)
Manual Chapter Selection Chapters v2
Bug hunting and fixing
Migrating remaining UI components to use the new design Overhaul of front-end architecture
Till next time 👋
