ChangeWindows 6 Preview 1

It’s been a while. About a year and 8 months ago we began pushing out ChangeWindows 5 Preview 1, and today, we gather around to start taking an early look at version 6 with version 6.0-alpha.1.

For this very first preview, you’re not going to see much has changed. But let’s first talk about the things that have changed that you, our regular visitors, will notice.

Minor design updates

First things first; you’ll notice that there are some *very* small changes to our design. We updates to Bootstrap 5 (alpha 3 to be exact) with this update. The scrollbar will now be a custom, thinner scrollbar that matches the theme color you’ve selected.

In the navigation, the “About” setting has been elevated to the main navigation, meanwhile the “Flight Feed” option has been removed and can now be found in the footer, which is a more logical place for our RSS link. Finally, logged-in users will notice that the profile menu has been changed from a generic icon with their name to an avatar placeholder.

It’s notable that we only fixed to most obvious bugs that showed up with the migration to Bootstrap 5. I’m planning to rewrite the entire front-end in an upcoming update.

Profile settings

If you have an account, and go to your settings (Profile menu > Profile Settings), you’ll notice that a bunch of options have been added. First of all, the Light and Black themes are now available on top of the White (default) and Dark themes for anyone with an account. This is temporary as with the rewrite of the UI in an upcoming alpha, these 4 themes will be gone.

You’re now also able to set a different email address as well as an avatar. And finally, you can now change your password without the need of using the “Password forgotten” function from the login page.

A brand new admin panel

The big update for alpha 1 is the new admin panel. Previously all admin-related features were part of the front-end, this is no longer the case. The front-end and admin area have been split up entirely. This is mostly a big change for our team, but it is noteworthy for you guys too, because the admin panel is introducing, finally, a search feature. This functionality will of course be coming to the front-end as well for all of you to enjoy. But that’s future talk.

Other new changes are the ability to remove changelogs (this was previously impossible). The markdown editor used in ChangeWindows now also supports a dark theme.

Accounts, roles & permissions

ChangeWindows 5 used a system where a role was pre-determined and what they could and couldn’t do was hard-coded into the system. ChangeWindows 6 switches this to a system where roles are dynamical and abilities are coded into ChangeWindows, with these abilities assignable to roles. As a result, we can create new roles much easier than having to track down each role instance and update it if we’d ever need a new one.

ChangeWindows 5.4

When we began previewing ChangeWindows 5 back in 2019, we also released ChangeWindows 4.12. ChangeWindows 5.4 is a similar update. With version 5.4 we’re just assuring that ChangeWindows and ChangeWindows Preview can pull their information from the same database. And once again we’re removing most of what’s needed to manage ChangeWindows.

We mostly do this to prevent the need for maintaining multiple versions of our management app in case things change, but also because ChangeWindows 6 takes care of a number of edge-cases that ChangeWindows 5 just doesn’t keep in mind and requires manual adjustments by our team when publishing new flights, milestones and changelogs.