First up, I'd like to thank everyone who has been providing feedback on the PH re-design. As lead developer, I'm trying to factor it all in to our development and prioritize fixes and improvements based on what people are asking for. We went through quite a bit of internal testing before unleashing the new PH for community testing a week prior to launch. Even so, various bugs have been spotted since we launched, both by the PH community and the team. Many are fixed, some are still in our bug tracker.
Some of the more visible things that have been improved in the week or so since the launch include:
- Restoring printer friendly mode in various articles where it had gone missing
- The submissions area now lists the status of your resources
- You can now edit the way that your submissions are tagged, to help make them more findable in the resource directory
- New resources now show up in "tag feeds", so get more promotion on tag start pages
- Tag pages now show synonyms for a tag, where we have them available...
Before now I've talked about our use of the Subversion version control system and Visual Studio.Net 2008. These are two of the most important tools we all use in our day-to-day operations. Today I am going to talk about another one that saves us a lot of time and potential mistakes:
Final Builder.
Programmer's Heaven is a large site. To keep the code base modular, we break it up into many libraries. Some of these libraries provide primitives that we use all over the place. On top of this bottom "layer" are another set of modules that relate to specific features. For example, we have the wiki engine, the forum, the blog engine and so on. Finally, there is the web project for the site itself...
