I made the initial post announcing Load Order Library on /r/skyrimmods on February 18th, 2021. That was almost 3 years ago. Since then, the site has seen a few updates and features introduced but has stayed mostly the same. For the past few weeks I've been working on a frontend rewrite and in doing so, also updating the design of the site. Don't worry though, most of the placement of items will remain the same, it'll just look different.

I initially designed Load Order Library to be a place for people to get help with their mod lists and for Twitch Streamers/YouTubers to have a place for each iteration of their list for various playthroughs under a single account. Funny enough, I actually never thought of it being used by Wabbajack modlist authors to provide an easy to view list of the mods present haha.

I appreciate everyone of you that's found some kind of use from the site, thank you.

Why do a redesign?¶

The current design is made using some hacked together Bootstrap design. Due to both Skill Issues on my part, and Bootstrap being...Bootstrap, I fought a lot with even getting the theme to be a dark theme to begin with (think !imporant all over the place and some styles just not working, like the hover style in the account dropdown menu). There's also the issue of every time I've gone to update the version of Bootstrap, something broke and I just can't be bothered to try to fix it when I'm also working on replacing it anyway.

The new design makes use of Tailwind and for me, is just plain nicer to work with. It will have both a light theme and dark theme, and you can decide what to used based on either your system's theme, or choosing one manually. I expect the redesign to be live on the main site in about a month or two, hopefully.

Another driver behind wanting to do a redesign was wanting to also provide an API for other people to make use of it they wanted. The API itself is in a state where it's production ready (minus one or two features like comparisons). Making an API I also figured it would be a good opportunity to decouple the frontend from the backend. The current site is just a Laravel project using Blade + Bootstrap for the frontend. The new stack is Laravel as the API and Sveltekit + Tailwind for the frontend.

You can see a comparison of the home page here: https://imgsli.com/MjMyODY3/0/2

You can also see the WIP site at https://next.loadorderlibrary.com

The Future¶

Load Order Library isn't going away any time soon and I have a few features planned over the next while:

Projects¶

Given that some modlists are created by teams of multiple people, I think it would be useful to be able to assign a list to be under a "project", and then the owner can give permission to other accounts on the site to be able to add/update/delete lists, instead of only one having the ability to do so.

This would also provide users a quick way to see previous versions of the list at a glance (project owners/people with permissions can also hide/delete older ones if they want).

Version History¶

While the projects feature can do this, I think it would be neat for individual lists to also have a version history. That's about the extent of the thought and it will be fleshed out over time.

Comparisons Rework¶

The current comparisons feature is...shit. It doesn't show a list as different if mods are in a different order, the view is confusing, etc. I intend to rework this to be more similar to a diff you'd seen on GitHub or something.

Editing/Deleting for Anonymous Lists¶

Sometimes you upload a list anonymously and miss something, or accidentally logged out, and then need to wait for it to expire and/or upload another one right away. The intention behind this feature is to allow people to edit or delete lists they uploaded, but still not require an account for that. It would be accomplished by providing some kind of "key" that gets stored in localStorage (and provided to the user to keep safe somewhere), if that key is present in a request to edit/delete, then the user is allowed to, all without needing an account. Also, if the user then decides to create an account in the future, and still has the "key", they can then associate that list with their account. You can kind of think of this key as similar to an API key that would be used to let another service make actions on your behalf.

There's some potential issues to iron out here, but I think this would be cool.

If you enjoy the site and want to support it, I have a Patreon and Ko-fi. Please don't feel obligated to donate or anything. Load Order Library will never have ads and always be free.