Hello Community,
It has been a while 
Actually it has been 10 years since I launched the Gladiatus fansite at https://gladiatus.gamerz-bg.com/
I stopped really maintaining it around 2019 and all this time people were occasionally writing to me for updates.
I've always wanted to migrate it to something more modern and to ease the hosting of it. Over the years, I've hosted it on cpanels, at home, in Azure.
Well,
For its 10th Anniversary, the website is getting a complete makeover. In fact, by the time I write this the new site should be live. With it comes a ton of improvements.
- Better framework - The original website in 2016 was created on Joomla CMS. While clunky in today's era, it suited my hobby dev skills 10 years ago and it has a really good SEO. The website ranks incredibly well in search engines. The new website is created on the incredible - Docusaurus. It is lightning fast, no database depedency, it is modern, it is based on markdown and has React capabilities. I thought it is the perfect fit. Also the time to do it is better than ever, because AI helped with migrating the Joomla to Markdown and do the heavily lifting.
- Website goes Public and open source - Github. Now everyone can contribute. I haven't written the guide on how people can contribute but it will soon be up on the site. For those familiar with Github, will know what to do immedaitely.
- The hosting becomes easier - I've had struggles hosting the site for 10 years. Now, with Docusaurus being a static site, I found a free hosting for the site on Azure Static Web App. The images do not fit on a Github repository, so I host them on an Azure Storage account (should be relatively low bill, will see in a month). Contributing to the images will be harder, but I welcome suggestions.
- More individual pages - The site now has individual pages for most stuff. For example, instead of all Italy expeditions to be on a single page, now every page gets its own. Same goes for many other categories.
- Better structure - Docusaurus is great, everything feels modern and well structured. Some may miss that the old site had more of a Gladiatus feel because of the menus, but maybe the new can be customized to that extent too, I am just not sure how yet.
What's next - I have a few great ideas in mind
Use the power of the new tech - Instead of relying on just text, I am planning on doing most of the cool stuff like items, prefixes and suffixes for real. Item stats, prefixes and suffixes will be coming from files such as - https://github.com/Djongov/gla…ee/main/static/data/items. This will open up posibilities for creating real items, cool tooltips of items just like in the game, opening the door for calculators, character planners (Michalus already has them for ages) and so on. This is really powerful. For example, the prefixes and suffixes are all coming from the json files and are being displayed on the website from that data. This means that if someone finds a wrong stat, missing stat, he just updates the data file and not some markdown text. This is already a fact for prefixes and suffixes and I plan to do the same for Items (which seems like a lot of effort so I hope i manage to finish it).
I don't play the game anymore and I don't think I will any time soon, so I will probably not be contributing to adding new stuff or fact-checking existing info. What I will do is fix markdown bloat from the migration, because my OCD is going nuts on some of the pages, and will probably finish the above ideas and let the community carry on from there so please, feel free to contribute. It might seem a little hard in the beginning, but I will try to make a good guide on how to do it.
And lastly, despite me not playing actively, I am still in love with the game, so many years later and I still love it, so much that I barely got any sleep for weeks back in 2016, from excitement on working on this project and I barely get any right now for the past week since I started migrating the site.
