Overhaul Plans

[ben-norton]

It's great to see the renewed interest in the Symbiota Portals. Are there plans to overhaul the underlying web application or update the style to a responsive design?

Thanks

[themerekat]

Depends on what you mean by overhaul, but yes, we are actively working on improving the styling for better access and ease of use!

[ben-norton]

@themerekat
Great question. Hopefully, I can answer without getting too far into the technical details.
First, please correct me if any part of the assessments regarding the current SERNAC site is incorrect.

1. Technical Overhaul. The current SERNAC Portal (https://sernecportal.org) is a native PHP web application with, most likely, a MySQL or PostgreSQL backend. The original codebase has been expanded periodically to add new features to the application over a number of years. The result is an organized but slowly sprawling codebase that becomes more difficult to update with every extension. A native PHP technology stack made sense when the site was originally built. Today, there are many more efficient, flexible, and interoperable frameworks and technical solutions for data-driven web applications. To incorporate new technologies (e.g., Vue.js/React, Laravel/Symphony. ElasticSearch, NoSQL, etc.), you would need to rebuild or 'overhaul' the site (maybe there's a scenario where another extension is possible, but the risk for disaster is very high). If built right, the difference between a 'modern' site and an application with an older tech stack is night and day by every available measure. Are there plans to do this?

2. Responsive Design. An effort to replace the existing design with one responsive to various devices is similar to the technical overhaul except technically much simpler (although design updates can be labor-intensive). Many frameworks are currently available that make responsive web design very easy to implement (e.g., Bootstrap, Tailwind, etc.). I assume that these were not around when the site was originally built. Responsive design is still fairly new relative to the evolution of the web (2015/2016). This situation is a common occurrence. You could upgrade the design without also upgrading the underlying technology stack, but most modern frameworks are packaged with a responsive framework (e.g., Laravel is packaged with Tailwind). So its usually best to do both at the same time. So, the same question as before, are there plans to do this?

[egbot]

Thank you for your input. That is a fare assessment of the history and current status of the code and development. Enabling a responsive design is definitely a priority this year, likely via bootstrap or similar ccs framework. A complete redesign of the application using a PHP or other framework has been considered, but at this point would require a massive effort. We are currently using Lumen/Laravel and Swagger to integrate an API, with the goal of increasing interoperability, as well as expanding the options of developing new functionality outside or in parallel of the current framework.

[ben-norton]

Awesome answer. Thanks
I use Laravel for just about everything.