DevBlog 0: The Mission
I am a huge Stargate fan so I was very excited about the release of stargatecommand.co a few weeks ago. The plarform is a project by MGM, meant as central community platform for the Stargate franchise.
The platform contains news & insights about the franchise, where registered users can discuss all things Stargate in the forum. Those who bought the All-Access pass for $20 can stream all Stargate series and movies on web & mobile. It’s also the only place to watch the upcoming mini-series Stargate Origins.
Unfortunately, it’s quite frustrating to use the platform as it is now. The frontend client feels buggy and slow and the UX is far from being good.
Another user and I did some research and figured out who developed the platform. MGM didn’t create it on their own. They licensed it from a company called TopFan which sells and maintains those community platforms for their clients. They are basically all the same, just with different styles and feature sets.
So What Are the Problems with the Community Platform?
They are hosting it on Heroku and for some reason they can not or do not want to scale it properly. So on high load, the requests take ages or simply time out (due to 30 sec timeout on Heroku). This wouldn’t be such a huge issue if the frontend client wouldn’t completely freeze on every single API request. The JS part of the frontend feels very buggy and unresponsive in general.
Another problem is that the forum part of the platform is an unorganized mess. They wanted it to look like Twitter but that just doesn’t work for a discussion forum. Many people already asked for categories for better organization.
The web version also hides some information, like the user notifications. Their mobile apps are way better in making those things visible.
Those are just the bigger issues I can think of now. There are a lot more smaller ones around UX and design, which make the usage of the platform less enjoyable.
Can You Solve Those Problems and What Is Your plan?
Yes, most of them can be solved, except when the platform doesn’t respond due to high load.
The plan is to create an alternative web client which uses all the original data but provides a better frontend. The user should be able to login with their original Stargate Command account and use the new client as it were the original one.
For the beginning the focus is on the forum and user system as they are the most used parts with the most usability problems. Other features like news posts and quizzes will follow afterwards. The only feature that won’t be implemented is the streaming of the Stargate series and movies because they are DRM protected.
What Is Your Tech stack?
I will be using Elixir and the Phoenix Framework for the backend part. The backend acts as some sort of API proxy between my own API and the internal API of stargatecommand.co. That way I can use the original data from Stargate Command and don’t need to store anything.
For the frontend I plan to use VueJS because it’s lightweight and I am very comfortable with it. I won’t create a full SPA though. I am a bit oldschool and prefer server rendered HTML and just inject JS components where I need interactivity.
The idea of this Medium publication is to have a place for a series of dev blogs where I show my findings and explain the technical implementations of my alternative Stargate Command web client.
