Temporary home for the beta preview: http://bandamp.thesimpler.net - Signup available for people that want to play around

Q: What is the update?
A: A reworking of the inside programming code that powers the site.  Right this moment, new features aren't the top-priority, simply because we want to make BandAMP's core as bulletproof as possible before we start complicating things.

Q: Bottom line: what's different?
A: The site is missing a few things, such as the battle system and chat room (listed below in a more complete list).  Differences at this point are mostly things you won't be able to see.  In fact, the goal of this particular update was to avoid changing the look and feel of the site.

A few really small things that are different:
- Deletion checkboxes on profile photos (can select multiple before choosing to delete)
- In-place editing on a few pages, like links and photos.
- Sticky threads.
- Handy access to your privacy control when uploading a song.  This means you don't have to upload it and then go back to your profile to change the privacy.
- New audio player, as supported by your browser.  If your browser doesn't have a built-in player, it'll use a simple Flash one.
- Several new preferences when editing your profile, such as if you prefer to have songs auto-play when you go to the page, how long you wish to be logged in when you sign in, email notification settings, etc.

Q: I see a few things are missing... what about those?
A: Things like the battle system, the chat room, and several random features are still missing.  All of those features will return.  The goal of the update is to completely imitate our current BandAMP.


I didn't get as much done today as planned, but a good chunk of stuff is ready to preview.  I want to make the code itself public in a few days' time, but I don't have a great way to do it quite yet.  More news on that later.

Here's a (mostly?) complete list of what is missing or needs fixing:
- Read/unread status of threads
- Emoticons are clickable, but they don't turn into their actual icons when the post is displayed.
- "Sticky" selection box is available to everybody-- that'll change.  Only admins and moderators will have that control.
- Admins cannot yet move/lock threads
- Users cannot rate threads. (this is tied to the battle system just a little bit, so it's priority wasn't super high before now)
- Youtube tag doesn't actually do anything
- RSS feeds missing
- Search not implemented
- "flat" pages (About, FAQ, etc) aren't posted
- PM system not implemented
- Online indicator not yet showing next to person's name on forum posts.
- Individual blog entries aren't viewable on their own, meaning that comments cannot be posted to them yet
- "Action" links on user's Music section don't do anything yet.
- Playlist section not very spectacular yet.  This is because of a planned revision of the section and how it works.
- Can't delete items from the "Links" section yet.
- "Favorites" section not available yet.
- Home page's sidebar of recent posts (etc) not available.
- Character counter on posts doesn't actually do anything
- No email notifications

Very exciting news man
Lovin it!

TLS, is there any way that in the new bandamp (or even in this one) we could have on the music page of our profiles a section that shows which collabs we've been credited in?  It wouldn't be too hard to implement (unless the way the collab system works now is that all it does is just link to whoever's credited's profile and that the collab system isn't actually centralized in a database.  I suspect it just works like that, unfortunately)

Yeah, the current implementation is just a text field with freely typed words— it would be slow an inefficient to try to scan all uploads and search for the username in those text fields, but it's a valid option for a simple stop-gap measure.

In this new demo site, it's using the same textbox idea, but I'm going to change it to a real selection list so that we can get it centralized and indexed in the database, making it trivial to show the usernames as links to their profiles, and to have a profile page for each artist to show the reverse-lookup of those entries.

Thanks for your input.  It helped me make a decision just now that I had been hesitating on.  It seemed to me that several people were using the "Collaborators" field to enter non-BandAMP members.  At first I didn't want to take that away from people, but I think the greater good is to make it clearer that we're trying to highlight songs created between BandAMP members.  Members could just add those extra collab notes for non-members in the body of their post.

Thanks!

Basic email notifications for thread replies now work, and it respects your setting from the profile page.  It'll render out the entire post body with rich formatting, instead of stripping it clean like BandAMP currently does.  This means that smilies and bold text (etc) will be visible from email notifications.

Is "admin@bandamp.com" a working email address?  I've never tried to email it

It is a term not an address, means this is a message from admin of bandamp

So far so good, Tim.

I've noticed the new songplayer allows my iPod to play tunes in the browser without tricks, that's a real good thing

I hope, when it's finished, the transition to the "new code" will go without problems. How will you manage that by the way? Are there any challenges in that?

The primary challenge will be data migration.  This code revision is intentionally similar to the existing BandAMP to reduce the difficulty of that, but we'll still have to jump through some hoops.  I'm optimistic, though.  Just need to push through until we get there.

Right, but the notification appears to be "signed" by "Regards, admin@bandamp.com", which is misleading if the address isn't actually real.  It's fine that the email is technically "from" the admin.  I'm just thinking it'll eventually make better sense to sign the email as just plain old "BandAMP".

Loving how this is shaping up guys, keep it up

Brief update— I had been fixing up a bunch a little things on the new demo site, and I really sank a lot of time into it.  Then real life caught up with me again and I had to do some work that I actually get paid for 

Middle of this week I'm going to get a few more items knocked out from the list in the first post.  I'm still excited and willing to work, so no worries there.  It's just that with the quitting of my previous job, I have to make sure that I pull in enough money doing contracting work that I can return to school for the next semester.

Just do what ever you need to do to get by man

And when you're done doing that, we're here waiting