ICU Web 2.0 just launched

You might have noticed something looks a little… different around here. But what exactly? 👀
Well, our brand-new website just went live, built with Next.js — and it’s here to breathe some fresh air into our student organization.

Farewell, WordPress 👋

Our old website was running on WordPress. And don’t get me wrong, WordPress is great. In fact, almost half of the websites on the internet are powered by it. It’s great if you want to quickly spin up a blog or portfolio without having to be familiar with a programming language. However, we came to the general conclusion that a student's organization should be exemplary to its students and not rely on the most comfortable solution.

Nevertheless, our website got cluttered with a tremendous amount of plugins over the time. Every single one those plugins was designed to serve a specific purpose. The result? Imagine playing Jenga with each brick being a plugin. Trying to remove or update a single brick resulted in catastrophic website failures. With that came a painfully slow website, random database error messages popping up like jump scares, and a backend which was extremely cluttered. It was a nightmare, even for us.

The New Era ✨

As computer science students, we felt like we had to level up. I mean, if we can’t even maintain our own website, what are we doing here? Enter: Next.js.

Next.js is a modern serverless web framework that’s fast, lightweight and in constant development. Sure, it’s not perfect (don’t get us started on image optimization 🙃 and memory leaks on development), but for our use case it’s a huge step forward and a massive improvement. It’s self-hosted, easy to maintain, and plays nicely with all the tools we might need in the future. Plus, since Next.js is now taught in SoPra (that lovely mandatory project module we all know and love… or hate), future board members should already be familiar with it.

PayloadCMS

For our website we needed a comprehensive application and not just static content. Implementing things like User management, updated Events or Ticketing systems requires quite a setup. This is where PayloadCMS comes into play. It's basically an extension to NextJS that provides basis for a Content Management System. Its extremely modular and allows us to write our own implementations. And the best thing? It's completely Open-Source.

Now at the time of writing this blog post. PayloadCMS has been acquired by Figma. I am not quite sure how this will play out, but we appeal to the humanity in them not to set a paywall infront of everything. However, thing will turn out, we are quite happy with the current state and are not planning on updating our PayloadCMS integration soon anyways.

🚨 TL;DR: The website is new, faster, and cooler. Built by students, for students.
If you find a bug, don’t panic. It’s not a feature (probably). Just let us know.

Changes

Except the new design of the website and new account management, the website brings some new features with it.

• Memberships are now integrated into the website and are no longer handled via twint qrcodes. This has been necessary as many of our emails tend to land in the spam folder. Also, it is easier to manage for our finance team :)
• Events our events have now inbuilt ticketing that are directly tied to you. With a little bit of coding magic, we are able to provide member only access, event waitlists, event specific food and drinks, and a lot of customizations.
• Event Memories is something that we have come up with which allows you to upload images after being at an event. For far too long we were counting on our board memebers to actively document the events with images. But we want to see your memories and hope you share some with us and the University!
• Products such as drinks or food that might be served at event can now be bought directly online. Remember the times when you had to wait in line to buy coupons during sangria or glühwein party? that's finally over.

Most of the changes, however, affect our back-end and are not really visible for the normal user.

Final Words

The development of the website has been quite a journey and i hope that you enjoy the fresh air as much as I do. There are still some improvements to make and many ideas to implement. If you have any suggestions or ran into issues, please do not hesitate to contact us at tech@icuzh.ch