Hello everyone! As you may be aware, with the retirement of our main developer, Jazzy, in March 2022, we have been working on rewriting the MKCentral website from scratch with our site development team, led by @Vike. Despite a rocky start with little progress in 2022, we have made lots of progress over the last several months of this year. With 2024 quickly approaching, we would like to share that progress with all of you, providing also a rough estimate of the new site's launch.
Site Progress
The initial goal of the new site was to have a replacement site for both the current MKCentral site and the MKLeaderboards site, along with an abundance of new features for both parts of the site. While progress on the online play side of the site has been going well, progress on the time trial side has mostly stalled in the last several months. This is due to a lack of developer availability and partial scope creep. Thus, for now, our current goal is to launch a replacement for the current MKCentral site as soon as possible; time trial support will be added at a later date. As such, the remainder of this post will focus only on the online play parts of the site. With this in mind, if any time trial players with web development experience are interested in helping expedite development, we encourage you to check the Contribution section later in this post. There, you will find out how you can get involved.
Focusing now on the site's developed features, most registry features relating to teams and tournaments have since been completed to the point where it should be theoretically possible to run tournaments on the new site. We have also added various brand new features that are not present on the current site, including support for tournaments where both teams on the registry and brand new squads can sign up, the ability to have multiple friend codes per game, searching players by FC while inviting players to teams or tournament squads, and MKW support for both teams and tournaments.
All of that being said, there are still many necessary features that have yet to be developed. The front-end design of the site still requires a lot of work to be as user-friendly as possible, too. Therefore, it will still be another several months before development is fully completed. On that note, though, we would also like to perform extensive beta testing of the new site before a formal launch; our rough plan for this is to start testing with various staff groups before potentially moving into beta tests with some users not affiliated with any staff group. Our current estimate for the new site's launch is late spring/early summer 2024.
Contribution
The code for the new MKCentral site has recently been made open-source:
GitHub - MarioKartCentral/MarioKartCentral: A monorepo that holds all of Mario Kart Central's open-source projects
A monorepo that holds all of Mario Kart Central's open-source projects - MarioKartCentral/MarioKartCentral
github.com
Special thanks to everyone in our development team who has helped us get this far!
@Vike @Cynda @naari3 @Olifre @fuyuneko @Jimmy @Devoty @SuperFX @Formosa @william__texas @ゼウス @ItoI06
We are always accepting applications for new developers! If you have some experience in web development and would like to join our Site Developer team, feel free to apply by reading this thread.
Future Updates
In the future, we will try to provide more frequent progress updates on the new site. We know it is frustrating going an extended length of time without knowing what's going on with site development, especially since newer communities (MKW) will be joining us upon the launch of the new site. To accomplish this, either I or another developer will post on this thread occasionally to give brief updates on any new/completed features from now on.
If you have any questions about the new site, feel free to reply to this thread with them. We'll try to reply to as many as we can. Happy Holidays and Happy New Year, everyone!
- MKCentral Staff
