Hi everyone,

It's been a while without any articles here. I realise that development work on Coloniae has been slow lately. At one point, we've had three whole new versions of the site in three years!

Now, believe it or not Coloniae is going to be 5 years old in August 2023. It has evolved a lot, changed servers... and it's not stopping, it's even expanding!

Source code publication

Today, I'm annoucing the publication of the source code of Coloniae. You can go to GitHub to see the repository. It contains all the code needed to run Coloniae (it will be missing some data, but all the code is here).

I've been wanting to do that for a while now but there was always a problem with the database. The site can't run without it, and you can't publish a 65GB database easily. Fortunately, user DefOnslaught (discord: defonslaught) contacted me about a bug in the ADU, and later offered to host a dev version of Coloniae with his server capacity, where we can have a test DB and webserver(s) for development.

I'd like to thank DefOnslaught very much for dedicating some of his time and resources into setting up what I think is a great way of making Coloniae truly collaborative. Of course, no system is perfect, but I think we've acheived quite a good stage. Also thanks to Pavlxiiv for a bit of testing.

How to participate

You may have a look at the code just because you are curious, maybe you want to learn, but maybe you also want to bring your own contribution! For that just contact me via Discord and we will be happy to provide you with access to the database and write permissions on the GitHub repo (it's very easy, but you need accesses!)

Here is some true artwork to visualise the possibilities:

(I know, it's beautiful) I think very few people will be using the Full local setup. I personally use the hybrid one, Def uses full remote.

Full guide

What's more, we have prepared a full guide that we will be updating as time goes and it will serve as a reference on how to contribute to Coloniae, access it here.

Future

Can I say that Coloniae is an ecosystem? I mean, we have Coloniae, Coloniae MC2, the Bomber, and the Translation Project (which even has a dedicated Android app, did you know?). For now only the "legacy" Coloniae website has its source code available publicly, but I plan on adding Coloniae MC2 and the Bomber very soon!

I really hope that curious people will look into the code and, why not give a try at developing a new feature, or making improvements? If you want to learn web development, it's also a great way to get into it with a real project!

On my side, I must admit that I only do maintenance on Coloniae and no longer actively develop new features, so I hope new people will take over! I'll still be here supporting that effort of course.

As always, let me know if you have any more questions!