Site rebuild progress report #2

The theme of frantic (and joyful) work and crazy hours has continued in these last seven days of Line of Action re-programming. In my last report, I was able to say that all existing features had been re-created on a squeaky clean and extensible code base. That's meant that this week, everything that's been built is a brand-new feature!

That's meant that by some measures you might think that progress had slowed down. Since everything is brand new, that means dozens of decisions about how each new thing will function, look and feel. That means figuring out all the persnickety details of how each new thing will interact with all the old things, and planning ahead for what's to come. It's meant balancing speed of development with acceptable quality, and deciding what improvements can be gone back for later and what we really need to have at launch. A certain amount of what's happened this week has been more diagrams and sketches in preparation for coding sessions!

Here are some of the major landmarks that have been hit in this last week of work:

• Member accounts have their own galleries, and can upload images into them. No more need to go to a third-party site like imgur to upload your work for critique!
• Check a box when uploading images to request critique on that image from other members, without having to make a separate forum post.
• Members can "react" to offered critiques with reactions like: Helpful, Informative, Encouraging and Discouraging.
• A special page that brings up recent critique requests has been created. It seamlessly pulls from both the critique forum and from individually uploaded images for which critique has been requested. Your own requests and requests you've already responded to are filtered out. Tips and guidance about how to give critique both you and the recipient benefit from are built into the page.
• It doesn't matter whether the critiquing is taking place directly on an uploaded image in a member's gallery, or on the critique forum -- you can still "react" to them, and the critiquer can still earn community achievements.
• A personalized "dashboard" page has been created. I'm calling it "your studio" so far. This page lets you set goals such as how many days per week you want to practice, how long you intend to practice per day, and the specific skill you want to work on during those practice times. Your daily, weekly and even monthly goal progress can be tracked on this page.

Here's a sneak peek of part of the new "you studio" page. It's a work in progress, but you can clearly see what it can offer.

Don't go looking for these new features yet! What you're seeing is still the old version of the site. We still have work to do on all the new features before the site can relaunch with all these goodies!

When will they be available? The scheduled release is at the end of September. However, if through some miracle I'm able to keep this break-neck programming pace up, it's possible the new site features could launch as soon as late August/early September. Fingers crossed!

Stay tuned for more updates on our rebuild progress. :D My next set of tasks focus largely on the tools themselves, such as allowing for more detailed pose selection and integrating in-class tips and guidance for those members that want it.