A Brand new Doras 🚀

Doras has hit v0.2, and with it comes an entire overhaul. How big of an overhaul? We rewrote every single line of code, from the ground up. Sometimes you have to tear everything down to make improvements, and we've corrected a lot of wrongs.

Improvements

• Instant page loading and navigation, no more waiting around
• Increased page speed
• More unified UI
• Doras is now a PWA application
• Brand Accounts got their much needed overhaul
• A whole new way of editing your pages
• Literally thousands of quality of life improvements

Bug Fixes

• To be honest, it's an entirely new codebase, so it's safe to say any bug you likely had before is now gone.
• We've done our best to test, but please if you stumble onto any bugs let us know in Discord!

Additional Notes

This is likely going to be the largest rewrite of Doras to ever happen. We wanted to rebuild from the ground up because of some glaring problems faced. I'm going to use this section to talk about some specific problems we faced, and explain why the rewrite was needed.

No matter what, we were plagued by these random "500 internal" errors. This is gonna get super web developer nerdy, but an important thing about Doras is that when we initially built it, it was completely different. The admin dashboard was it's own website using AstroJS, and then the frontend website was also using AstroJS. We then migrated the backend over to NextJS, keeping the frontend on Astro. Then we went NextJS & NextJS, then we went full NextJS on one site. 

With all of that, we also went from self hosting the site on our own servers, to using Cloudflare Pages, to now Vercel.

During this, there was a lot of "legacy" code, and code that just straight up didn't make sense, and we weren't using our web development frameworks to their fullest potential. We got it in a working state and released it.

This overhaul has allowed us some time to rebuild from scratch on a full NextJS stack, utilizing the latest of Next and React.

New Preview

We've launched a new preview panel to help you see the changes your making, and allows you to scale it so you can compare how it looks on mobile vs desktop.

Theme Overhaul

This is going to have to be broken down...

Theme Page

A new page to manage all the customization with sub categories.

Heading & Identity

Here you can configure:

• Profile picture & shape
• Layout style
• Display name
• Biography
• Pronouns
• Location
• Tags (coming soon)

Global Styles

• Background
  • Color
  • Image
• Colors
  • Heading text
  • Button text
  • Primary (used for buttons)
  • Accent (used for navigation)
• Block Style
  • Button shape
  • Transparency
  • Shadow
• Font picker

Additional Options

The only thing in here currently is the option to modify the raw CSS by giving you an input box to modify the CSS of your page.

Going forward, we're dropping the "cycle" releases like this, likely releasing more frequently, but with less change log, unless it's a major release! We've written about it in detail here: One month into development cycles.. How is it going?

Now, let's talk about what's arrived!

Custom Pages 🎉

Custom pages have finally made it! This allows you to create more than one page for just your links and blocks! 

Free users: Homepage + 2 additional pages
Doras Pro: Homepage + 9 additional pages

The mediakit and story pages aren't counted in these, but we're planning deprecating them in the future as we're making them "blocks" instead to allow you finer control and display of them! 

Improve navigation systems 🚀

Look, it wouldn't be an update if I didn't completely overhaul the UI! Let's run over some of the latest features.

Sidebar improvements

The sidebar can now be expanded to show the name of the feature you're in, rather than just the icon and tooltip when hovering.

This will now also be the sidebar on mobile view, except it's shrunk be default, and when you open the sidebar it overlaps on everything below, creating a better experience for our phone friends!

We've also introduced the "Account Switcher", which allows you to change between your brand account and user account seamlessly.

The Command Panel ✨

I use tools every day like Linear, Vercel & more, and one thing that I love about those platforms is being able to press a hotkey, type what I'm looking for and clicking enter to navigate to it, so that's what I've build for Doras!

Now you can press ⌘/Ctrl+K (depending on Mac or Windows) to open up our lovely Command Box!

I can see a lot of use cases for this in the future, and look forward to expanding on this more to allow more functionality!

Better Page Loading 🐌

Some nerdy stuff, but basically we've migrated away from using native links for navigation over to using the NextJS app router and next/navigation to improve page loads and stuttering between navigation of pages.

Notable mentions (but don't deserve a whole thing...)

• Added the Pix logo for our Brazilian friends! 🇧🇷
• Expanded and improved our database tables
• Included the name of the image on gallery to help find what you're looking for

 

Important Changes

The Admin Dashboard has a new home!

The admin dashboard is now doras.to/admin instead of admin.doras.to. This helps us with some internal testing and deployments, as well as simplifies our code-base and middle-ware.

The API gets a new (much needed) domain!

The API domain was previously doras-api.site, which caused a lot of problems! We've now migrated over to api.doras.to and updated our documentation on the matter! 

First test of the new development cycles

If you've been following the "Doras Lore", you'd have seen this post about improving our development cycle. The TL;DR is that we've now moved to releasing once every two weeks (give or take) rather than micro releases which lead to multiple releases even happening within a day or a few hours!

With this, we've been working on some testing and pre-production tests and other sorts before the deployment to production which we're hoping to kick off much stronger in the next release.

All this helps us improve the quality of the code we ship, and give you guys something to look forward to! 

Added Features

Link Shortening is here!

That's right! All Doras Pro users can now create shortened links, replacing services like Genius and Bitly to help redirect users with prettier and branded links.

• Supported formats:
  • https://username.doras.click/example (default)
  • https://username.doras.to/s/example
  • https://doras.to/username/s/example

Custom domains are not available for shortened links currently, but will be added after initial testing!

New ways to share your profile!

Ya'll asked, and we listened. As well as the possibility to generate a panel picture for your Twitch, you can now also generate a QR code that links directly to your profile!

As of right now, it'll only go to your "doras.to/username" page, but will be adding in custom domain support in the future!

Brand Accounts are finally here!

Just a heads up, this is "pre-alpha" and is also only available to Doras Pro users! The current feature set is the very same as standard user profiles and nothing build "special" for them.

This pre-alpha will help us see what users want and how they use them. In the coming weeks, we'll allow free users to also create Brand Accounts.

No more image links, we have a full gallery now!

This one is massive. No more will you need to upload an image somewhere else and then copy the image link. We've built a full in-house solution for an image gallery where you can upload images directly to Doras and use them across your profile! Background images? Yup! Image blocks? Obviously! How about icons for link blocks? You bet your sweet bippy you can!

To help us with storage costs, we've currently limited the size of images to be 1mb, but you can upload anything from jpg/png/webp/webm/gifs!

YouTube Video Embeds!

Yep! You can now embed a YouTube video directly onto your profile! Right now you need to share a specific video, but we'll be working in the future on adding features like "latest video", etc!

Integrations with our Discord Server!

First, if you're not in the Discord, what are you doing?! Come join the awesome community!

If you didn't sign up to Doras with Discord, you can now link your Discord account in the user settings. Once your account is connected, your roles will be synced. That means that if you have Doras Pro, you should get the Pro badge in the Discord server! Do know it may take a few hours to carry across as it's not a constant check but runs on a schedule. If you don't see your badge after 24 hours, just give us a ping!

We're also hoping to bring more cool things over like little things for Server Boosters, etc! We'll see!

Improvements

We've made some further improvements to Doras in general which I'll outline here:

• Got a sick new landing page to hopefully help showcase what Doras is and how it can help anyone
• Minor updates to the site navigation
• Nicer icons for the sidebar
• 50% opacity background on story blocks to help readability (huge love to dclasair for the awesome suggestion!)
• Improved our SEO on blog posts and such
• Minor cleanup of the UI on the Design page
• Relocated over to a new headless CMS system for making posts (like this one!) and for additional things like managing banners on the homepage and admin dashboard
• Payments with our provider are now linked to your userID, not email
• Added a changelog page (that's me!)
• Websockets for tickets (basically realtime updates and not needing to refresh to see the latest)
• Added "Share" buttons to blog posts

It's been a wild release

But we're so happy with the progress of Doras, and we're not done yet! Thank you all for being here with us and giving us an amazing first month of being your link in bio provider ❤️

 

Added

• Ability to have an image as a background image instead of color

If you remove the image, your previous background will be visible. This is currently alpha so there is no option to upload an image, but to link to an existing image link

Updated

• Increased the size of icons to match the size of text

Added

• Hover effect to link blocks, scaling 5% on mouse hover

Fixed

• Search bar in font picker
• Uniformed the styling of fonts from the admin dashboard & the actual site (there was previous problems of different bold-ness, etc)

Added

• Fonts:
  • saira
  • gabarito
  • onest
  • pixelify-sans
  • kufam
  • monomaniac-one
  • cuprum
  • paytone-one
  • luckiest-guy
  • jockey-one
  • passion-one

Fixed

• Hide Doras.to in page meta if branding is set to off. Thanks @RadgeGamer for the report!
• Accessibility fixes for images and buttons to help folks with screen readers to the A11Y standard. Not 100% complete, but much higher scores than previously

Added

• Throne icon

Updated

• Cleaner UI on dropdown on dashboard

Added

• Image carousel showcasing some of our users
  • We plan on having an option for users to "opt-in" to this in the future!
• Card for non-pro users on the Dashboard to explain why they might want to consider Pro (not spammy, no popups, etc. Just a simple card to explain ourselves!)

Fixed

• Work on affiliate tracking systems
• Image compression for profile picture on upload fixed (some people had 1mb files and when they got converted they turned into 16mb lol)

Added

• Ability to add a URL to image blocks so you can click an image to go somewhere

Fixed

• Bug where you could create accounts without setting a username

Updated

• Larger view for color picker for making complex gradients