We've been working on this website since December of 2024. It's been a rocky and challenging process to say the least. I (JLeopolt), had to learn a ton of new technologies to get to where we are today. Our website changed scope drastically in the summer of 2025, and that was when most of the development happened. Also, our new identity provider (which we'll cover in another blog post) took up a ton of development time and still has to be babysat every once in a while to this day!

Our legacy website (which is still currently available at legacy.pyroneon.net) was honestly a complete mess. It was written in plain HTML/CSS/JS with a super basic Python Flask backend. In fact, we couldn't even reuse components easily without custom jQuery and Jinja tricks. This was a great learning experience, and more than suitable for a basic website. However, our website grew in scope and this old solution just couldn't keep up. We needed to switch to a content-driven website with a CMS (Content-Management System).

The article you're currently reading was written in one! Our new website uses a CMS called "Payload", which is a special app that lives inside our Next.js web application and lets us update the website in real-time (in a limited capacity). For example, we can write new articles, create blog posts, update promotional material, and even issue broadcasts, all without ever having to relaunch the application or change any code! This takes a bunch of work behind-the-scenes, which is why the new app took so long. We're still working all the kinks out of it. From our point-of-view, we just open up the admin panel on the site and click a few buttons to create a new article and start typing. We can even upload images, link to other custom articles, and do so much more.

As I mentioned earlier, it'll stay up for now at least. It will probably be shut down completely in the future. But don't worry! This site will do everything that one could, and so much more! In fact, our new CMS gives us a ton of flexibility for creating custom content on the fly and updating stuff. This site also gives us a permanent home, so we won't have to depend so much on Reddit, Twitter, and other social media platforms in the future.

There's a ton of work left to do. Just making the site is the easy part, now we have to write content, fix any residual bugs, and make optimizations where needed. This is in addition to all the other things around PyroNeon that need to be worked on and fixed. We hope to have the website done (in a working state, with all the content from our legacy site transferred) as soon as possible. We appreciate your patience! Here's to a productive and amazing 2026!