Release Notes
Welcome to PalWeb! Here's what's new.
PalWeb v1.2
PalWeb v1.2 is probably the most significant update to the site since I first transitioned to the Laravel
framework in 2022. And yet in retrospect it will probably be the least significant of the next few updates to
come. More & more of the application is being built using Vue, which means a much smoother user experience. But
more importantly, I've established a foundation to build the interactive activities that I've envisioned for the
Academy portal. Starting with this update, I can finally work on it in earnest.
PalWeb v1.2 introduces a handful of significantly improved & brand-new features. Here is a summary of
these new features. If you'd like more information on how to use these tools, see the User Guide.
Search Genie
The Search Genie is your all-in-one solution to searching the site, accessible anywhere by clicking on the
button prompt in the top-right corner, or with the shortcut Cmd/Ctrl+K. Quickly switch between types of
results — Terms, Sentences or Decks — & apply filters to get specific results in real time. Any filters you've
applied for Terms will persist while searching for Sentence & Decks, so you can search for Decks with a specific
term in it, or get all Sentences with a pseudo-verb.
Moreover, the Search Genie is context-aware. Open it in the Deck Builder to add Terms to your Deck.
Open it in the Card Reader to pin new Decks for studying. Use the Search Genie wherever you see
the button prompt to see what you can do with it! By the way, since searching is now handled holistically by the
Search Genie, I have removed the search bar from the Deck Library & the Phrasebook,
replacing it with a prompt to open the Search Genie.
Deck Builder & Card Viewer
Both of these tools were already present on the site, but they looked radically different from how they do now,
especially the Deck Builder. Instead of accessing these tools by interacting with a Deck on the main
site, you can simply boot up either of them to view a page with all the Decks available for you to use: your
created Decks to edit in the Deck Builder or your pinned Decks to study in the Card Viewer. Use
the Search Genie within these tools to get everything you need on the spot, as explained above.
Record Wizard & Audio Library
The Record Wizard is by far the biggest new feature in this update & a game-changer at that, if I do say
so myself. I want to give credit to
Lingua Libre,
whose Record Wizard I used to create the 3,000-odd audio files that were featured first on Wiktionary & then on
PalWeb. Their Record Wizard, published on a public repository on GitHub, served as the basis for mine. Again,
see the User Guide for more information about the
functionality of the Record Wizard itself.
I have created an all-new Audio Library within the Community portal. Like the other content
libraries on the site, its main page is a paginated index of all the Audios in the database, with a few filters
that allow you to view all Audios by Speakers of a given Dialect, from a given Location, with a given fluency
level, etc. Speaker profiles live within the Audio Library too.
In terms of the backend: Instead of each Pronunciation having a single Audio (in fact there was no Audio model;
this relationship didn't exist in the backend), now one Pronunciation may have an unlimited number of associated
Audios. In the Dictionary, the first two Audios — sorted by Speaker fluency — are displayed under their
corresponding Pronunciation, while all Audios for a given Term may be viewed by selecting "See All Audios" from
the Context Actions menu.
Sitemap
All of these new features have necessitated a restructuring of certain areas of the site:
- the Deck Library has been trimmed down by moving the featured Decks to the Community hub.
- the new Community hub displays the latest Decks & Audios, giving a shout-out to the site's most
prolific Pals too.
- the Workbench has been streamlined to highlight all these new tools.
What’s Next?
I previously promised that I would finally get to work on the Academy portal by January & I'm happy to
confirm that this is still the case. In the next six months, I'm going to focus on adding activities to PalWeb.
I will actually be starting by adding activity features like quizzes to the Card Viewer, as these will be
the basis of the more complex activities I plan to create for the Academy. Naturally, this will require
me to build a scoring system & a way to track what activities the user has completed. As is often the case with
PalWeb, this will be a multi-faceted endeavor, but I'm hoping to complete it in about three months.
Once that is all set up, the core architecture of the site could be considered complete, meaning I will be able
to proceed to working primarily on content creation, namely the content of the Academy portal. While I
already have most of the curriculum planned out, I hadn't set out to do this yet because it didn't make sense to
do so before finishing most of the functionality that I would need to leverage in that area of the site.
