This post will go into detail about the latest release of my userscript Pendorian Elite UI for Pendoria.

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Why 3.0 over 2.6?

As of this update I’ve taken every module of Pendorian Elite UI and split them into their own folders. In order to accomplish this I’ve written a builder in Node.js to read all of these modules and build them into a userscript. As the entire core of the script is technically being rewritten, in order to follow Semantic Versioning I decided to name this version a major version, version three.

Note that Elite UI Release 2.6 which is the previous version I released will still be available to download as a legacy release.

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Why not Webpack?

People have asked me why I didn’t use Webpack to build my userscript, and the answer is that it isn’t meant for this. Webpack was intended to take the many files associated with a website and merge them to avoid multiple requests, I needed something different. My builder which I’ve dubbed “Elite Builder” takes code originally intended to stay within one file and merge them all together.

On top of this the options section had to have detailed comments and be easy to understand for those that aren’t developers.

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Elite Builder?

This first iteration of Elite Builder isn’t pretty but it gets the job done. Simultaneously it opens the door to automatically building an options menu in the future, and if a menu gets added it wouldn’t be too hard to turn Pendorian Elite UI into an extension!

As an extension Pendorian Elite UI would rely on nothing but Pendoria, and streamline the installation process.

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That it?

That is it for this release, with these changes it will do wonders for expanding Elite UI’s capability.

Here’s the official release notes from the GitHub;

  • Split every module into their own files.
  • Created a builder in NodeJS to build the userscript from the module files.
  • Modified all variables to follow JavaScript standards.
  • Modified strings to use template literals.
  • Optimized the Extra Bottom Links Module.
  • Renamed the Extra Bottom Links Module to Extra Footer Links.
  • Rewrote the readme file to be more focused.