After some downtime on the ol’ Winnipeg website, it’s suddenly been a busy month for the code! We’ve been quietly working away at modernizing the site, squashing bugs, and building something we’ve wanted for a long time. Here’s everything that’s landed:
A Fresh New Look.
The biggest focus this cycle was dragging the site out of the 2020-era design it’s been living in. Nearly every page got touched:
- New font — The FIR’s official font, Gilroy, is now site-wide, giving everything a cleaner, more modern (and standard) feel.
- Homepage hero — It’s been fully rebuilt with a nice new shiny parallax, gradient overlays on top of your screenshots, an animated word flip that features FIR town names, and a news ticker bar replacing the previous cards with controllers, weather, etc.
- Dashboard — Also redesigned a bit, with a dark blue gradient background instead of the solid blue, and some new components here and there to smoothen the experience out.
- Staff & instructor pages — The staff page has a new look, with new horizontal cards, freshened colour-coded specialty pills for instructor specialties, and a cleaner executive team layout.
- Events & news — Visual upgrades across the board, most importantly with past events now sorted with most-recent-first. Can’t believe it was ever the other way around.
- Airports page — The airports page has a nice upgraded layout! A new sidebar menu (or just a dropdown, if you’re on mobile) gives a much cleaner, almost “not the same website” feel to a page designed for pilots above all else. We also added YVC to the airports list, since they’re getting an ATIS. Congrats, La Ronge!
- Feedback page — Just a small redesign on this, with a two-column quote card grid instead of a straight up list. It should be a bit easier to read, now.
- Alert bar — We refreshed this with some less “blocky” colours (yes, this matters).
- Join page & training page — These two pages were badly due for a mulligan, and they both got one! More details for new students and visitors was the goal, and we got it. The training wait time also now has a “last updated” date stamp.
- Policies & meeting minutes — Just refreshed these two pages to make them look a bit more modern – nothing more here.
- Navbar Refresh — The navbar has gotten a nice polishing, with some new animations, and cleaner buttons/dropdowns.
Oh, and yes — we added a couple more easter eggs. You’ll find them… eventually.
Mobile Users, Rejoice!
The mobile navbar was badly overdue for a rework. We replaced the old Bootstrap collapse behaviour with a proper full-screen overlay, tap-to-expand dropdown sub-items, a sticky navbar, and better spacing throughout. It actually works like a mobile nav should now. That said, I’m still not totally in love with it, so this might not be the end of the road for the mobile navbar story. Stay tuned.
Drumroll… The Training System is Alive!
This is the big one. We’ve built a brand new training system into the site, and it’s live now. Here’s what’s in it:
- Training waitlist — students will be added to the waitlist by staff, and said staff can manage that list, including editing user entries when needed. They can also pre-add a student to the waitlist before the user logs into the website, using their CID. Once the user logs in, they will plop right onto the list where they belong automatically.
- Instructor linking — students are now linked to their assigned instructor directly in the system – this will eventually be linked to the VATCAN.ca system to save a step. That said, students will now see their instructor name and email on their Dashboard as well.
- VATCAN training notes — users’ training notes from the VATCAN.ca system now pull directly into their training profile on this site, sorted by most recent for staff/instructors to view.
- Waitlist details — this is the big one: students can now view that number they are on the waitlist for training on their Dashboard, as well as how long they’ve been waiting. This automatically pulls from the aforementioned website’s waitlist and student/instructor linking system, so it should always be accurate. Yay, transparency!
And Of Course, Bug Fixes
- Users were hitting 500 errors when opening staff support tickets
- Controller profiles were tracking hours monthly instead of quarterly, and only backing up the previous month. They’ll now back up to 6 months to match the new controller profiles that you can see on the roster by clicking a controller’s CID.
- Live events were showing as “past events” — they now correctly show as LIVE, as they should always have. They’ll also feature on the homepage news ticket when active.
- Homepage weather was broken due to a config caching issue
- The SimAware link for the “Live Map” in the navbar has been (finally) replaced with a link to VATSIM Radar
- Various smaller fixes across the roster, bio preferences, and homepage
This has been a long time coming and we’re excited to keep building on it, and we’re still working to make it even better. So stay tuned!
Thanks for your patience as we continue to improve the site. As always, if you spot something broken or have an idea, please open a staff ticket on the WinnipegFIR.ca site, an issue on the GitHub or reach out to the staff through the Virtual Winnipeg FIR Discord!