v4 update - Jan 2021

[benkeen]

Happy New Year, y'all!

It's been a few weeks since my last update, so here's the latest status update on v4 of the script.

I've been happily unemployed the last 6 weeks, giving me plenty of time to focus on this script. Alas, all good things come to an end: I start a new position on Monday (I'm being facetious: I'm actually looking forward to the new role :)). But things are likely to quieten down for a while - certainly initially - while I find my feet at my new job. That said, I've made an enormous amount of progress these last few weeks. I'm pretty pleased overall.

The new public website is well underway. I've edited the script (the open source code in this repo) to allow it to be extended in various ways, like allowing custom routes to be loaded, and the new site is looking very smart. The big things I need to tackle before getting it up onto generatedata4.com (the temp testing domain) are:

1. completing the user accounts. It's mostly working now, but there are still some key gaps I need to plug.
2. finish the google auth integration
3. adding in payment integration so people can sign up. I really cannot stand PayPal, even having used it for so many years. So the new site will use Stripe instead. I may add PayPal in as a second option later, we'll see.
4. emails! The system needs to send email notifications for a couple of things (initial signup + password reset), which means I need to figure out how to send emails from node.
5. docker image release process for live site & proper integration with prod site, including nginx config.

My general goal is to focus on getting the website completed first so I can show it off & test it on the temporary generatedata4.com subdomain. Once that's up and running I'll turn to completing the open source project, including writing all the documentation (no small feat!).

Anyway, I'll keep you posted through here.