V1 Release 😀

This release brings the Southwest communities to v1..... finally. The majority of work has been focused around reducing the over the wire size of the site.

Changes in this release include:

• Adds a dark mode, tracking the users' system setting
• Reduces page reflow further
• Serves different sized banners, dependent on screen size... saving up to 250kb on page load!
• Loads mailchimp css/js only on pages with a newsletter signup form... saving up to 35kb on page load
• Removes some packages used at build time
• Plus other minor tweaks to the build, js minification and the removal of unused CSS

Performance improvements

This release has been focused on performance improvements of all kinds. Improvements include an average reduction of data transferred per page by up to 43%, removal of JS libraries, and reworking of critical CSS. It includes:

• Lot's of work on removing reflow on page load
• Refactoring of the mailchimp validation JS. This removed a duplicate version of JQuery, saving a good chunk of JS parsing.
• Reoptimisation of images
• Switch lazy loading from a library to the browser
• Move external CSS which was not gziped or minified to the internal project
• Removal of fallback google tag manager stuff

Shiny New Features

This update includes a few new features, a handful of minor bug fixes, and some tiny tweaks to the build pipeline. This is on top of an expansion of included communities.

Features

• Adds filtering of events. Whilst complete and working (focusing on online / location filtering), more organisers need to be added to the project before being fully enabled.
• Adds an RSS feed of all events
• Adds Online events labeling in replace of venues
• Replaces google analytics with minimal analytics
• Implements Web Share API progressively
• Where needed, the full description for an event is retrieved from Eventbrite

Fixes & Improvements

• Removes icons from the code base and replaces those used by inline SVGs
• Fixes broken twitter link
• Adds generation of images at build time
• Removes compiled items from the repository
• Moves some content generation to the internal api server
• Many tiny tweaks to improve page speed
• Add about us page
• Add privacy policy
• Removes the hero images from lazy load
• Add beta tester signup link
• Add a newsletter signup to home page
• Misc updates to environment and languages
• A few minor tweaks to improve site performance

Minor updates

This update includes:

• SEO improvements
• A11y updates
• Moved functionality to the server
• Improves filename generation
• Adds google calendar link
• Adds a number of events under each heading
• Fixes issues with sitemap.xml

Minor Updates and added communities

This release makes many minor tweaks to the site and it's layout.

Lots of new communities added to the data set

Refactors part of the layout to accommodate the removal of duplicate info elsewhere in the app eco system.

Improved event retrieval and redundancy

Following issues with the build process being unable to retrieve events from source, we've made a few changes to the South West Communities website and underlying services.

• Moved to Meetup API v2 to allow for multiple event retrieval in a single call. This helps with preventing capping due to overuse.
• Switched to organiser IDs rather than URL names for meetup. This will prevent events from disappearing if the organiser changes the group name
• Implemented a cache system for the internal API, preventing additional calls to 3rd party services during testing.
• Added a basic JSON data structure for feeding data into the (as yet) unreleased public API.
• Rewritten the build process to knock off upto 20 seconds build time.
• Changes to the layout to improve A11y.

There have also been 13 minor changes to improve organiser handling, event sorting, stability/availability of the API and increasing developer happyness.