Team: Developers

The Data Access Layer that powers lib.reviews is now its own GitHub project, rev-dal. The DAL is the interface between the web app (what you interact with) and our PostgreSQL database.

The “rev” stands for “revisions” — one thing that characterizes most data in lib.reviews is that it’s versioned and supports multi-author collaboration in principle.

We’ve started using this DAL for another project, AGPWiki, so it made sense to pull it out of the lib.reviews monolith.

This should have no user-facing impact whatsoever, but if anything suddenly throws up weird new errors, please do let us know.

To make review feeds easier to scan through, reviews (except super-short ones) are now collapsed by default with a “Read more” link. I’m sure the UX for this could be improved, so don’t hesitate to open an issue or ping us on Mastodon if you have thoughts or ideas in that respect. Shout-out to Nortix and Enigma for the initial discussion about this change.

(Happy new year! Aiming for federation in 2026! :-)

We just finished a migration away from the unmaintained Pure.css CSS framework to the minimalist and modern Pico CSS. As part of this, we’ve made a few design changes:

• The site now has dark mode. If it changed from light to dark for you, that’s because your system appearance is set to prefer dark mode. You can change your preference in the site footer.

• A few pages that didn’t work well due to tables now display a more mobile-friendly card format on smaller sizes, notably the “invite link” page.

• On mobile/tablet screen sizes, we now collapse the navigation into a small menu. This menu should work with JavaScript disabled.

• In desktop mode, reviews are given more prominence on a few pages. User pages, team pages, and review subject pages now display reviews in a wide column on the left-hand side, and metadata in a smaller sidebar.

• Text pages like the FAQ now display a table of contents, auto-generated server-side from the headlines (no JavaScript needed).

We’ve cleaned up a few smaller things across the board - padding, alignment issues, etc. Perhaps most notably, text now has a bit more line-spacing and a larger font size to aid readability.

This is a big set of changes, and it’s quite likely that there are some design regressions. If you find any, please don’t hesitate to let us know, no matter how small it may seem to you. We want to get the little details right!

Huge thanks to lib.reviews user and moderator Nortix, who built out prototypes of several of these ideas here. There are other ideas in these designs which we haven’t implemented yet, but may add in future, such as review statistics on user pages.

Next up: user preferences. As part of that, we want to revisit how content languages are handled in lib.reviews, giving users the option to write in a language we don’t have a full UI localization for.